David R. Baker, Staff Writer - San Francisco Chronicle
Stephan: This is an important development in the transition out of the carbon era.
A high-stakes fight that mixes renewable power, international relations and cyberespionage threatens to slow the American solar industry’s rapid growth.
Last week, U.S. Department of Commerce officials tentatively agreed to slap tariffs as high as 35 percent on much of the solar equipment American companies import from China.
SolarWorld, a German company whose U.S. base is in Oregon, sought the tariffs, claiming China’s government has unfairly subsidized its solar manufacturers and flooded the world with cheap panels. It’s a familiar argument to anyone who remembers the 2011 bankruptcy of Solyndra, the federally funded startup that made tube-shaped solar panels in Fremont until plunging prices drove it out of business.
But many U.S. companies have come to rely on cheap panels from China. And they want SolarWorld to back off.
Companies that install, sell or lease solar arrays have seen their business boom as panel prices fall, tumbling 70 percent since the start of 2010. Tariffs, they say, will make solar power less affordable and slow its rapid spread across the country.
“It’s going to do a huge amount of damage to the installers and developers,” said Rhone Resch, chief executive officer of the Solar Energy Industries Association.
His trade group has been trying to broker a […]
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EVAN HALPER, - Portland Press Herald (Maine)
Stephan: Here is the most interesting news I have read recently about GMOs. The citizens of Vermont have done what money and propaganda have blocked up until now in other states -- labeling GMOs. Where Americans in other states were too ignorant or befuddled to see where their own self-interest lay, Vermonters compelled their legislators to act on their behalf. And the result, as this story outlines, may be that the few hundred thousand people of Vermont may finally change the game for the 315 million in this country by creating a situation where federal labeling regulation becomes inevitable. Bravo, Vermont. Now if we could just get labeling telling us about the pesticides and other toxins in our food.
The biggest worry weighing on the nation’s food industry may not be drought in the West, farmworker shortages or turbulent international trade negotiations, but a change in the regulatory code in Vermont.
Under a law signed this month, the tiny New England state, population 626,000, will soon require that food companies tell consumers which products on grocers’ shelves have genetically modified ingredients. In doing so, Vermont could force food growers, processors and retailers to upend how they serve hundreds of millions of customers nationwide.
The law puts Vermont at the forefront of a national movement that major food processors and agricultural companies are doing their utmost to kill.
Agribusiness firms and trade associations have poured tens of millions of dollars into political advertising and consultants to campaign against GMO labeling requirements and have enlisted members of Congress in a bid to outlaw state labeling rules. Industry officials have also vowed to sue Vermont, hoping to block its rule in court.
But although the industry has won several major battles on the issue – including ballot initiative campaigns in California in 2012 and in Washington state last year – the national push for GMO labeling has proved a resilient grass-roots effort, given added push by […]
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CLIFF SCHECTER, - The Daily Beast
Stephan: I don't know about you but the past week for me has been surreal; about every three days there is a mass murder. A recent one, where a Florida man shot his wife and three children, then himself was described by the Sheriff at the crime scene as "This is everyday USA behind me." As I read that I realized he was speaking the truth.
The American gun psychosis fueled and egged on by the NRA has burst out of control. Yet, still we haven't reached the tipping point. What do you think it will take?
It’s been quite a month for the National Rifle Association: Massacres at universities, in restaurants, and at retail stores from South Carolina to Las Vegas. Gun nuts porting assault weapons to dinner from Chili’s to Chipotle. The leaders of the take-no-prisoners gun-rights organization have been witness to the logical outgrowth of its policies and rhetoric. Much as the GOP helped create the lunatic-fringe Tea Party within its midst, the NRA chieftains have helped birth a beast whose black heart now beats strongly among its most radical adherents.
The NRA’s officials purposefully pipeline propaganda to the most loony-tunes among us. They’ve told these gun cultists that they had best arm themselves with as many weapons and as lethal weaponry as they can get their hands on, because either a black president or a black helicopter will be hunting them down shortly. Simultaneously, they’ve used every electoral and lobbying tactic to best enable these unstable individuals to have access to the weaponry of war from which they and their arms-dealer cronies so handsomely profit.
The result: They’ve watched impotently as this witch’s brew of mental illness, far-right politics, propaganda, and heavy weaponry has led to one shocking-yet wholly predictable-massacre after another, with the […]
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Stephan: This is a really good essay on what has happened to our higher education system. It is part of the profit cancer that is ravaging the body of society.
The price of a year at college has increased by more than 1,200 percent over the last 30 years, far outpacing any other price the government tracks: food, housing, cars, gasoline, TVs, you name it. Tuition has increased at a rate double that of medical care, usually considered the most expensive of human necessities. It has outstripped any reasonable expectation people might have had for investments over the period. And, as we all know, it has crushed a generation of college grads with debt. Today, thanks to those enormous tuition prices, young Americans routinely start adult life with a burden unknown to any previous cohort and whose ruinous effects we can only guess at.
On the assumption that anyone in that generation still has a taste for irony, I offer the following quotation on the subject, drawn from one of the earliest news stories about the problem of soaring tuition. The newspaper was the Washington Post; the speaker was an assistant dean at a college that had just announced a tuition hike of 19 percent; and the question before him was how much farther tuition increases could go. ‘Maybe all of a sudden this bubble is going to burst,” he was […]
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Stephan: We are a nation of immigrants. Everyone, including those we call Native Americans, originally came from somewhere else. The Revolution for our independence was fought by immigrants and the children or grandchildren of immigrants. We could not be America were it not for immigrants.
SAN FRANCISCO — More than one-third of U.S. Nobel prize winners in chemistry, medicine and physics are immigrants, a new report shows.
The report, released Thursday by the National Foundation for American Policy, a conservative research group, shows that since 2000, two dozen immigrants won Nobels in those fields, out of 68 U.S. prizewinners in chemistry, medicine and physics.
The NFAP hopes the research shows the contributions of immigrants in important fields will bolster the chances for the passage of immigration reform, which has been mired in Congress this term.
While the U.S. Senate passed an immigration bill last year, the measure has stalled in the House of Representatives where Republicans remain deeply split over what to do about the more than 11 million undocumented U.S. residents. Many Republicans want to await the outcome of November’s elections before revisiting the issue.
Opponents of the reform say immigration is holding down pay, stealing jobs from Americans, and in the case of undocumented workers, potentially rewarding those who didn’t immigrate through legal channels.
Legislation dating from 1965 that lifted quotas on national origin, a key driver of Asian immigration to the United States, coupled with 1995 legislation that increased employment-based immigration, have helped build the surge of […]
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