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Archive for May, 2009

GM Filing Ch. 11 Bankruptcy Monday in New York

General Motors Corp. president and Chief Executive Officer Fritz Henderson will hold a mid-day news conference from the GM Building in New York on Monday, the day the 100-year-old automaker is expected to file Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

GM, which has lost nearly $90 billion since 2005, is expected to file bankruptcy in U.S. District Court in New York, where rival Chrysler LLC is undergoing a court-ordered restructuring. President Barack Obama also plans to address the nation Monday on GM’s planned court restructuring.

Blue Collar U.S. Males Are Taking the Biggest Hit During This Recession

One statistic that stands out in America’s recession-stung economy is the unemployment rate for adult men: in April for the second month in a row it surged ahead of the national average to 9.4 percent versus 8.9 percent for all workers. The jobless rate for adult women was 7.1 percent.

The reasons are clear: male-heavy sectors such as construction and manufacturing have been hard hit. But the implications may be dire for the broader economy and hamper the recovery as families that once had male breadwinners struggle.

The fact that American males without a college degree are especially vulnerable in this cycle point to more hard times ahead for the U.S. working class, which has endured stagnant and declining wages for the last three decades.

For those without a college degree or better, it has been a bloodbath.

The construction jobs will return, but we are seeing an unusually sharp drop in what is left of manufacturing and much of that drop will not be recovered when the recession ends, and much of what does remain will  be at lower wages with reduced fringe benefits.

Let’s Get Real About Alternative Energy

(CNN) — We need to introduce simple arithmetic into our discussions of energy.

We need to understand how much energy our chosen lifestyles consume, we need to decide where we want that energy to come from, and we need to get on with building energy systems of sufficient size to match our desired consumption.

Our failure to talk straight about the numbers is allowing people to persist in wishful thinking, inspired by inane sayings such as “every little bit helps.”

Assuming we are serious about getting off fossil fuels, the scale of building required should not be underestimated. Small actions alone will not deliver a solution.

Let’s express energy consumption and energy production using simple personal units, namely kilowatt-hours. One kilowatt-hour (kWh) is the energy used by leaving a 40-watt bulb on for 24 hours. The chemical energy in the food we eat to stay alive amounts to about 3 kWh per day. Taking one hot bath uses about 5 kWh of heat. Driving an average European car 100 kilometers (roughly 62 miles) uses 80 kWh of fuel. With a few of these numbers in mind, we can start to evaluate some of the recommendations that people make about energy.

Take, for example, the idea that one of the top 10 things you should do to make a difference to your energy consumption is to unplug your cell-phone charger when you are not using it. The truth is that leaving a phone charger plugged in uses about 0.01 kWh per day, 1/100th of the power consumed by a lightbulb.

This means that switching the phone charger off for a whole day saves the same energy as is used in driving an average car for one second. Switching off phone chargers is like bailing the Titanic with a teaspoon. I’m not saying you shouldn’t unplug it, but please realize, when you do so, what a tiny fraction it is of your total energy footprint.

In total, the European lifestyle uses 125 kWh per day per person for transport, heating, manufacturing, and electricity. That’s equivalent to every person having 125 light bulbs switched on all the time. The average American uses 250 kWh per day: 250 light bulbs.

Most of this energy today comes from fossil fuels. What are our post-fossil-fuel options?

Among the energy-saving options, two promising technology switches are the electrification of transportation (electric vehicles can be about four times as energy-efficient as standard fossil-fuel vehicles) and the use of electric-powered heat pumps to deliver winter heating and hot water (heat pumps can be four times as energy-efficient as standard heaters).

Among all the energy-supply technologies, the three with the biggest potential today are solar power, wind power and nuclear power.

It’s not going to be easy to make a energy plan that adds up, but it is possible. We need to get building.

BrightSource and PG&E Ink Largest Solar Energy Deal

photo: BrightSource Energy

California utility PG&E on Wednesday expanded an agreement with BrightSource Energy to buy 1,310 megawatts of carbon-free electricity to be generated by seven giant solar power plant projects – the world’s biggest solar deal to date. Coming on top of a 1,300 megawatt agreement with Southern California Edison in February, the Google-backed, Oakland, Calif.-based  startup says it now holds more than 40% of the Big Solar contracts in the United States.

While BrightSource’s technology is untested on a large scale, the company has built a six-megawatt demonstration plant in Israel, where its technology development arm is headquartered. BrightSource deploys arrays of mirrors called heliostats that concentrate sunlight on a water-filled boiler that sits atop a tower. The intense heat vaporizes the water to create high-pressure steam that drives a standard electricity-generating turbine.

Woolard says an independent engineering firm, R.W. Beck, has validated the technology at the Negev Desert demo plant. That no doubt helped persuade PG&E, which has sent executives to Israel to inspect the project, to supersize its contract.

“What it came down to is that they saw us delivering,” Woolard says. “Our plant in Israel performed above expectations. The fact that we have a solar plant producing the highest quality, highest temperature, highest pressure steam anywhere in the world is the most important thing.”

U.S. Jobless Rate Rises to 25 Year High

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. employers cut 539,000 jobs in April, the fewest since October, according to government data on Friday that signaled the economy’s steep decline may be easing.

However, the Labor Department said the unemployment rate soared to 8.9 percent, the highest since September 1983, from 8.5 percent in March. Payrolls figures for March and February were revised to show job losses were 66,000 more than previously reported.

Still, the better-than-expected data was further confirmation that the intensity of the recession was starting to fade, with economic activity expected to gradually recover toward the end of the year.

“It’s all going to add to the conviction that the economy is approaching bottom,” said Pierre Ellis of Decision Economics in New York.

Fed Chief Bernanke Sees Signs of U.S. Economic Recovery

WASHINGTON — Ben S. Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, said on Tuesday that the economic free fall of the last nine months was nearing an end and that the United States should begin a fragile recovery by the end of this year.

In his most upbeat assessment in a long time, Mr. Bernanke said a wide array of indicators, from consumer spending and home sales to a revival in the credit markets, now suggested that the economy was stabilizing.

Obama Targets Job Outsourcing

President Barack Obama promised sternly on Monday to crack down on companies “that ship jobs overseas” and duck U.S. taxes with offshore havens.

It won’t be easy. Democrats have been fighting — and losing — this battle since John F. Kennedy made a similar proposal in 1961.

The president’s plan would limit the ability of U.S. companies to defer paying U.S. taxes on overseas profits. At the same time, Obama would step up efforts to go after evaders who abuse offshore tax shelters.

“It’s a tax code that says you should pay lower taxes if you create a job in Bangalore, India, than if you create one in Buffalo, N.Y.,” Obama said Monday.