Derrick Jackson on Tax Rebates for New Cars:
Mikulski mustered all the Chicken Little she could. “My amendment is not about bailouts,” she said in a prepared statement. “It’s about jobs, jobs, jobs. Six million jobs are at stake in the American car industry . . . The only way to save the Big Three is to get people into showrooms, but 1,000 dealerships could close this year. That’s 53,000 jobs that could be lost just at the dealerships.”
Ugh..the stupidity of saving jobs of the 20th century at the expense of jobs of the 21st century.
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On a day when the WSJ has an article that opens with, “It’s tough to be green when money is tight,” treehugger has an article on learning from the inherent sustainability from the world’s poor (because it is actually easier, if not imperative to be more “green”):
…contains the attributes for environmentally and socially sustainable settlements for the world’s increasingly urban population…. The district’s use of local materials, its walkable neighbourhoods, and mix of employment and housing add up to “an underlying intuitive grammar of design that is totally absent from the faceless slab blocks that are still being built around the world to ‘warehouse’ the poor.”
“I strongly believe that the west has much to learn from societies and places which, while sometimes poorer in material terms are infinitely richer in the ways in which they live and organise themselves as communities,” Prince Charles said. “It may be the case that in a few years’ time such communities will be perceived as best equipped to face the challenges that confront us because they have a built-in resilience and genuinely durable ways of living.”
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From the Center for Neighborhood Technology:
In turquoise, areas of the DFW metroplex where housing + transportation costs equal more than 48% of median household income:
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And finally, the best for last…Treehugger, which tends towards either of two extremes; the very granola low-tech or the super high-tech gadgetry, comes this article that ghasp, sustainability and tackling sprawl is about proper planning rather than new “eco-towns.”
“Everyone gets seduced by the ‘green bling,’” Stephen Platt of Cambridge Architectural Research told me. “Making the houses energy-efficient is the easy bit. The key problem is making this a long-term socially acceptable place where people will want to live and prosper.”
