A solar windfarm
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Here in Seattle, we are in the midst of a truly epic fustercluck. We’re trying to build a huge tunnel beneath our downtown and it is not going well, to put it mildly. If only someone had warned us! (Like, I don’t know, a mayor.)

Our own Nate Johnson has written about the propensity of transportation megaprojects to blow past their projected budgets. But what about my own personal obsession, power projects? Think, for instance, of the Kemper power plant in Mississippi, which is still under construction and already several billion dollars over budget and several years behind schedule.

Is this kind of thing inevitable? If large power projects — or certain kinds of large power projects — reliably go over budget, then it may be that we’re systematically mis-predicting energy scenarios and misallocating investment dollars. How much do we really know about which power projects go over budget and why?

Nerds to the rescue! As it happens, energy researcher

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Credit: The Guardian

A few days after the murder of nine people at Umpqua Community College in Oregon, Mike Rosen joined the National Rifle Association.

Rosen, an elected member of the Portland public schools board, has never so much as fired a real gun let alone owned one. But he was frustrated that, for all the talk of tighter gun control after each mass killing in the US, nothing changed because of the power of the NRA.

“I was really impressed by what Obama said in his address to the nation. That this has got to be a single voter issue. Only vote for people that are for gun control,” he said.

“I keep hearing that there are people in the NRA who want gun control and I have friends that are NRA members who own guns and want gun control. So why not get people to join the NRA and change it from within?”

The first obstacle to Rosen’s strategy was the reaction of liberal friends.

“It was like I had gone to the enemy camp. My […]

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REYKJAVIK, Iceland – In stark contrast to the record low number of prosecutions of CEO’s and high-level financial executives in the U.S., Iceland has just sentenced 26 bankers to a combined 74 years in prison.

The majority of those convicted have been sentenced to prison terms of two to five years. The maximum penalty in Iceland for financial crimes is six years, although hearings are currently underway to consider extending the maximum beyond six years.

The prosecutions are the result of Iceland’s banksters manipulating the Icelandic financial markets after Iceland deregulated their finance sector in 2001. Eventually, an accumulation of foreign debt resulted in a meltdown of the entire banking sector in 2008.

According to Iceland Magazine:

In two separate rulings last week, the Supreme Court of Iceland and the Reykjavík District Court sentenced three top managers of Landsbankinn and two top managers of Kaupþing, along with one prominent investor, to prison for crimes committed in the lead-up to the financial collapse of 2008. With […]

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Ferguson, Missouri Police Credit: USToday

A tiny Missouri town disbanded its police department last week, acknowledging that its old way of operating was untenable under a new state law restricting towns in St. Louis County from using cops, courts, and speed traps as a money mill.

Facing the loss of the traffic fines and court fees it relied upon for funding, the town of Charlack, MO, is dissolving its tiny police force and contracting out from a new player on the law enforcement scene in the St. Louis area. The North County Police Cooperative (NCPC), an outgrowth of neighboring Vinita Park’s own police force, will take over responsibility for the handful of streets that make up tiny Charlack.

Charlack isn’t the first town to dissolve its force in recent months, and it likely won’t be the last either. Starting in the next fiscal year, St. Louis County governments will have to prove that they get less than 12.5 percent of all operating revenue from fines and fees related to minor traffic violations.

The law was […]

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A study published Tuesday by UC Berkeley professors concluded that unmitigated climate change will reduce the average person’s income by 23 percent and increase the global inequality gap by 2100. (Emphasis added)

The researchers conducted the study by comparing economic data from the World Bank with climatological data and then analyzing it using econometric processes. According to the study’s estimate, 77 percent of countries will become poorer than they would have been without climate change.

The study was led by UC Berkeley associate professor of public policy Solomon Hsiang, campus professor of environmental and resource economics edward Miguel, and Stanford University assistant professor of earth system science Marshall Burke.

The research team also found that climate change will increase the global inequality gap, with the poorest 40 percent of countries experiencing a reduction in income by nearly 75 percent by 2100. Researchers found that because poorer countries tend to be warmer, they are more negatively affected by increasing temperatures. Richer, colder countries, on the other hand, may experience slight increases in productivity.

“(Climate change) is causing major trauma for almost half the world’s population that’s much poorer than we are. … We should know that’s what these actions are doing,” Hsiang said.

The team […]

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