An amazing new business model from the company SolarCity, the SolarLease, enables homeowners to get a state of the art solar energy system installed for $0 down payment. As a customer you rent the solar power system and only pay a monthly fee.
The best thing? SolarCity help their customers save more on the electricity bill than the monthly rent of the system. Save money and produce you own green energy, can it get any better? You also get free monitoring and repair service and you can follow your own “power plant” on your smartphone. The future is bright, green and great!
For a typical 3-bedroom home with a current electricity bill of $200 per month, we might recommend a medium sized 4 kW solar system.
Your new solar system will generate enough electricity to offset what you are currently paying to the utility company from $200 down to $60 per month.
Your SolarLease payment would be $0 down and $110 per month. So you could actually save $30 per month from day one.
Fascinating TED talk by Sam Harris on the issue of science and morality. Conventional wisdom tells us that science is good at answering “how” questions, but that it isn’t of much help in answering complicated “why” questions. If a society wants to build a bride, science is good at answering how to best design it, what materials to use, how to model the landscape in the best way, what the environmental impacts will be, etc. Science, most people think, however can’t answer questions like whether to build the bridge in a low- or high-income region, how to balance environmental concerns and economic development, if the bridge-money is better used for schools or hospitals, etc. Conventional thinking is that science can “help us get what we value, but can never tell us what we ought to value”.
In this talk Sam challenge this notion however, by building on the assumption that ethics and moral isn’t “divine” in the sense that moral judgments just “are”, but is always implicitly or explicitly maximizing some kind of variable. Sam suggests that morality as we use it generally is designed to maximize the welfare (or minimize the suffering) of living beings. There are, Sam continues, often many ways to maximize this welfare, but his point is that how to maximize it (i.e. do the morally right thing in this context) often has an objective answer and thus moral decisions in this sense has a scientific component. If we use morality as a way to reduce suffering, consequently, morality based on feelings or religious arguments can’t be defended if there are scientific evidence that the actions stemming from these arguments is a suboptimal way to reduce suffering. In this way, when morality itself is a means to an end and when science can offer answers to what works in terms of getting to that end, science can (and maybe should) replace non-science based notions of morality.
An obvious and unanswered question is to what extent ethics and morality are just tools to achieve something (like minimal suffering and maximal freedom and welfare) and to what extent ethics is instead universal truths for which the means does always justify the end. This issue has of course been debated for ages, but Sam does offer interesting insights to it. Perhaps, as science progresses it will inevitably conquer more and more domains that up until then we didn’t possess objective knowledge about, and therefore had to base our actions on other principles. How far can science guide us and is it possible to define more precisely the boundaries of science? Watch the talk!
The Chinese clean energy juggernaut has not lost pace recently in contrast to the two other large markets for new energy asset financing. Who will win the race to spur the Google’s of the cleantech era?:
I would like to recommend a really nice website called Project Syndicate. Many of the world’s leading thinkers (mainly economists and political scientists) are writing articles commenting on current issues. It’s well worth spending some time here to read about things such as the Euro crisis, the Chinese economy or democracy in the Arab world. Check it out at www.project-syndicate.org
Project Syndicate is a voluntary, member-based institution. Its mission is to:
bring the highest quality commentaries and analysis by the world’s most distinguished voices to local audiences everywhere; and
strengthen the independence of printed and electronic media in transition and developing countries.
Interesting article about the “trilemma” of democracy, national sovereignty and globalization. According to Dani Rodrik at Harvard one can’t have all three without one of them getting compromised. You can have democracy and a strong nation state, but then have to limit globalization. You can have democracy and globalization, but then you’ll have to limit the nation state and opt for some kind of global governance system.
I often think and discuss this issue. Today you can’t wake up in the morning, get dressed and have breakfast without having had connections with the whole world. The clothes you wear are produced in Asia, you eat food from Africa and Europe and drink coffee from Latin America. We have strong nation states and globalization, but somehow democracy is compromised as the consequences of our decision making process is no longer only affecting (or even chiefly affecting) the populace with the right to vote. I personally love the benefits of globalization, but we will have to instigate effective and democratic global governance systems in order to make it work better and better respond to crisis such as global warming or financial turmoil.
I just recently bought my first iPhone and it’s possible the best buy of my life. I’ve found some nice apps and thought I would share them.
Facebook - Goes without saying, with push service Skype - Obviously Google - All google apps in one iPhone app, including voice search. Cool! SR - Swedish radio app BBC World News - BBC text and live video news NYTimes - News with a broad selection of categories: World, U.S., Politics, Business, Technology, etc. White House - News and videos (a lot of videos for Obama fans to enjoy) China Daily - Chinese news in English, has a nice feature with travel and tourism information Nike+ - Track and benchmark your training, requires a Nike transmitter in your trainers SOUTcast - Great radio app with thousands of stations and a really good browsing system WunderRadio - Also a great radio app, not as good browsing but nice features like GPS-tracked local radio stations as well as a play in background feature that uses Safari to enable background playing.
These technologies [disruptive zero-carbon tech] still have to prove that they are reliable, durable and scalable — and if you Google both, you will find studies saying they are and studies that are skeptical. All I know is this: If we put a simple price on carbon, these new technologies would have a chance to blossom and thousands more would come out of innovators’ garages. America still has the best innovation culture in the world. But we need better policies to nurture it, better infrastructure to enable it and more open doors to bring others here to try it.
Who, Where, Why?
I'm a 28 years old swede political economist and entrepreneur trying to make things more sustainable. Here I write about things I do and think.
