While constituents meeting Senators and their staffs was the priority and primary motivation behind last week’s Clean Energy Works fly-in, the presence of almost 200 people from around the country was also an opportunity to publicize the wide support for comprehensive climate and clean energy legislation to a bigger audience. The Town Hall Meeting was [...]
“Sixty is the new fifty” may have first been said about aging baby boomers, but it’s also the new reality of getting anything done in the US Senate. Although the Senate’s rules have long been structured to allow careful deliberation or endless delay, depending on your view of a particular situation, their use has been [...]
Last week, I participated in the Clean Energy Network fly-in to Washington in support of comprehensive energy and climate change legislation.
Hovering in the background of several current energy and sustainability-related news stories is the question of tax breaks and subsidies for energy. In the wake of the BP oil spill disaster, the Senate Finance Committee will discuss a possible rollback of oil and gas tax incentives, partly to fund clean energy incentives and job creation. [...]
In May, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac threw a monkey wrench into programs set up to encourage and enable homeowners to make energy savings investments in their homes. PACE (Property Assisted Clean Energy), described in this earlier post, funds energy improvements as a property betterment, allowing the payments to be made alongside property taxes and [...]
As a rule, US investors don’t pay much attention to European Union regulations but they probably should. The European Union countries have more people (497 million versus 300 million) and a larger GDP (18 trillion versus 14.5 trillion) than the US. With that large a market, it isn’t just large multinational manufacturers who are doing [...]
Two unrelated recent announcements heralded the arrival of Exchange Traded Funds to the world of sustainability investing. While this development represents another symbolic step in the mainstreaming of sustainability investing, the value – to advancing sustainability or investor returns – is much less clear. In May, Pax World Investments announced the ESG Shares, passively-managed Exchange [...]
President Obama, John Kerry and other Senate leaders are planning a strong push to pass Comprehensive Energy and Climate legislation during the July work session of Congress. In early June, the President promised to “find the votes” for comprehensive climate change legislation. Senator Kerry’s American Power Act is working its way through his Foreign Relations [...]
