Workgroup for Safe Markets launches new website

My friends at the Workgroup for Safe Markets have launched a new website that you might find interesting.  Go to http://www.safemarkets.org/.  

The Workgroup for Safe Markets is a US-based collaborative of groups united by a common concern about hazardous chemicals in our homes, our bodies and our environment; and a common vision of a cleaner, healthier economy. These groups are leading the effort to protect our families and communities from the devastating impacts of toxic chemicals, and to shift the economy to safer products and practices. The Workgroup for Safe Markets is part of the Coming Clean collaborative, which hosts leading environmental health and justice experts who are working to reform the chemical and energy industries so they are no longer a source of harm. For more information, visit www.ComingCleanInc.org.

Clearly identifying toxic chemicals in products small businesses use and sell to customers is important.  Protecting the health of our employees, customers and ourselves is a goal we should strive to achieve.  And if we can do that while at the same time creating jobs through the development of safer chemicals to replace the toxic ones, we improve our economy also.

Where do we go from here? Congaree Vista Development Symposium – 2013

Thirty years ago Columbia embarked on its most ambitious re-development effort ever – seeking to renew and rehabilitate a long neglected city warehouse district located near the downtown urban core. These efforts paid off and many small businesses have turned the Vista into a vibrant area of retail shopping, restaurants and entertainment.  The Vista is Columbia's premier redevelopment success story.

SC Small Business Chamber of Commerce will host a public forum Thursday, August 22, 9-11 AM at the Hilton Columbia Center Hotel. This forum will explore the history of the Vista redevelopment, examine the City of Charleston’s ongoing renewal efforts, and discuss steps forward for continuing the development of the Columbia’s Vista.

The event is free and open to the public, although advance registration is suggested.

Featured Guests:

• Tim Keane, Director of Planning, Preservation & Sustainability for the City of Charleston
• Fred Delk, current Executive Director of the Columbia Development Corporation
• John Fellows, Planning Administrator for the City of Columbia
• Rosie MacFarlane Craig, developer and owner of two historic Vista properties

Moderator: Frank Knapp, Jr., President & CEO, South Carolina Small Business Chamber of Commerce

To register for the Symposium send an email to sbchamber@scsbc.org.

For More information, contact Frank Knapp at 803-252-5733.

 

You’re invited to hear Bill McKibben in Charleston

The South Carolina Small Business Chamber of Commerce is pleased to co-sponsor a free lecture by Bill McKibben in Charleston on October 16^th at 6PM.   McKibben is the founder of 350.org and has been called by Time Magazine “the planet’s best green journalist”. 

The title of the lecture is “The Climate Heats Up” and it comes just months after the Small Business Chamber launched our sea level rise education project (www.scbars.org) along the S.C. coast.  There is no bigger threat to the state’s small business coastal tourism industry than rising seas resulting from climate change.  If the nation doesn’t take significant steps soon to transition to a clean energy economy, the cost to the state and cities to deal with a sea level rise of up to 6 feet or more by the end of the century will be astronomical.  However, even with such a mammoth and expensive effort of resilience our coastal tourism economy will suffer immensely.

The Small Business Chamber has 10 reserved seats for the McKibben lecture that will otherwise be general seating with no reservations.  If you would like to join us in our reserved seating area, please email me at sbchamber@scsbc.org. 

Details for the event are as follows:

What: Bill McKibben Lecture: "The Climate Heats Up"

When: Wednesday, October 16, 2013 at 6pm

Where: Physician's Auditorium on the College of Charleston Campus, 66 George St., Charleston, SC

Doors will open at 5pm.  Limited general seating is available, so please plan to arrive early.  

65 Percent Isn't Enough And Job Creation Is Suffocating

The South Carolina Small Business Chamber is making steady progress on setting up a donation and investment crowdfunding portal to give small businesses and entrepreneurs another means to access capital.  To find out more click here.

Below is an excerpt from an opinion editorial in Forbes by Ty Kiisel that addresses the issue of capital access.

Unfortunately, partially because of the way the SBA defines small businesses, traditional small business lending has moved upstream since 2008 and is catering to the bigger businesses on the small business continuum. The average 7(a) loan amount in 2012 was far more than what those Main Street business owners are looking for to grow their businesses and create jobs.

We recently pulled a sampling of about 44,000 borrowers who visited our platform during the first six months of 2013 and 59 percent of those business owners were looking for small business loan amounts of $50,000 or less—39 percent were seeking loan amounts of less than $25,000.

As credit tightened following the financial meltdown and the community banks and other traditional lenders small business owners would have turned to 10 years ago collectively turned them away, access to the inexpensive capital small businesses rely on to grow and hire employees dried up—leaving the nation’s biggest employer [small business] out in the cold.

Read more

SC Small Business Chamber of Commerce to Host Congaree Vista Development Symposium 2013

Found—the thousands of new jobs promised from Keystone XL pipeline

How many new jobs might be created if the Keystone XL pipeline is built from Canada to the Gulf Coast for the purpose of carrying the dirtiest, carbon-saturated oil in the world for refining into fuel? This has been a perplexing question. 

TransCanada, the would-be builder of the approximately 2000 mile long pipeline, has claimed 20,000 new jobs.  The U.S. State Department estimates that the construction might create less than 4,000 temporary jobs and only 35 permanent jobs. 

How can this significant discrepancy in predictions be explained? Here is the obvious answer.

The State Department had too narrow a definition of a new job created by the pipeline.  It’s not just how many workers are involved in the construction and operation.  TransCanada and other supporters of the pipeline are also counting all the jobs needed to clean up the mess from the inevitable oil spills.

The New York Times ran a story yesterday that tells about recent pipeline oil spills that take years and tens of millions of dollars to clean up.

It has been three years since an Enbridge Energy pipeline ruptured beneath this small western Michigan town, spewing more than 840,000 gallons of thick oil sands crude into the Kalamazoo River and Talmadge Creek, the largest oil pipeline failure in the country’s history. Last March, an Exxon Mobil pipeline burst in Mayflower, Ark., releasing thousands of gallons of oil and forcing the evacuation of 22 homes.

Both pipeline companies have spent tens of millions of dollars trying to recover the heavy crude, similar to the product Keystone XL would carry. River and floodplain ecosystems have had to be restored, and neighborhoods are still being refurbished. Legal battles are being waged, and residents’ lives have been forever changed.

“All oil spills are pretty ugly and not easy to clean up,” said Stephen K. Hamilton, a professor of aquatic ecology at Michigan State University who is advising the Environmental Protection Agency and the state on the cleanup in Marshall. “But this kind of an oil is even harder to clean up because of its tendency to stick to surfaces and its tendency to become submerged.”

These massive cleanup operations will directly hire workers that are sure to be high-paying jobs with long-term security given the spillage record of pipelines.  In addition there will be thousands of jobs created in the construction industry to build new homes for displaced families and to deconstruct the homes adjacent to the oil spill.  Then there are all the jobs needed for the increased demand for relocating folks.  And we know that people like to buy things for a new home so retailers will need more employees, manufacturers will have more goods to produce and so on and so on.

There is the explanation for the different predictions of new jobs from constructing the Keystone XL pipeline.  The State Department was just not counting all new jobs.  The real short-term employment growth is in the aftermath of the TransCanda-expected oil spills from the pipeline.

 

Pollution Economics

The New York Times
August 10, 2013

By DIRK FORRISTER and PAUL BLEDSOE

WITH more than a million people in China dying prematurely each year from breathing its dirty air, and with warming temperatures portending rising sea levels and disruptions to food production, the centrally planned Communist country is experimenting with a capitalist approach to address the problem: it is creating incentives so that the market — and not the government — will force reductions in emissions.

The United States invented this approach in the 1990s to deal with acid rain. The effort was tremendously successful in reducing sulfur dioxide emissions that were poisoning lakes and streams, contaminating soils and accelerating the decay of buildings, at a cost lower than even its advocates anticipated.

But the United States has taken a policy detour that has hurt its efforts to reduce greenhouse gases. Congress has spurned the cap-and-trade approach China is trying, even though it is widely recognized as a cheaper way to lower emissions. As a result, President Obama has had little choice but to turn to government regulation to reduce these pollutants. Consumers will pay a higher price for electricity as a consequence.

China, the world’s largest emitter of carbon dioxide, has begun its effort in the southern city of Shenzhen, paving the way for a national Chinese market in a few years. Like Europe, which voted to extend and improve its emissions market, and Australia and New Zealand, Shenzhen chose a carbon market as the most efficient way to lower its greenhouse gas emissions.

Under the Shenzhen program, the government will set limits on carbon dioxide discharges for 635 industrial companies and 197 public buildings that together account for about 40 percent of the city’s emissions. Polluters whose emissions fall below the limit can sell the difference in the form of pollution allowances to other polluters. These companies must decide whether it is cheaper to reduce emissions or pollute above their limit by buying allowances, whose price will be set by supply and demand. But the pressure will be on, because the limits will decrease over time. Six more regional pilot programs are planned over the next year.

More than 20 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions are now subject to carbon pricing systems. About 60 other states, provinces or countries are considering similar approaches, according to a recent World Bank report.

Carbon cap-and-trade programs align environmental goals with market incentives. Conventional regulatory approaches “cannot ensure achievement of emissions targets, create problematic unintended consequences, and are very costly for what they achieve,” says the economist Robert N. Stavins, director of the Harvard Environmental Economics Program.

So how did America detour away from emissions markets, which are the preferred approach of many economists, climate and consumer advocates, and many electric utility companies that own and operate power plants?

It all comes down to politics. Before the last recession, political support was building for a carbon market, with various Republicans, including Senator John McCain, his party’s 2008 presidential nominee, supporting a market-based approach. After House Democrats approved a cap-and-trade bill in 2009 that put a price on fossil-fuel emissions, the issue became a target of the Tea Party. In the midst of the worst economy in 75 years, the Senate declined to take up the measure, and cap and trade became a dirty term on Capitol Hill.

Even so, several states already have turned to this approach. California’s effort began in January. Nine mid-Atlantic and Northeast states use it under the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative.

In Washington, faint whispers of a carbon tax are still occasionally heard as a solution for budget and environmental problems in a single policy. But even if that were to happen, the tax would probably be small and would not guarantee the reduction in emissions needed. Like a tax, carbon markets can also generate revenue that can be rebated to consumers or used to lower other taxes.

The United States can still move back into a leadership position in the effort to reduce carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Learning from the experiences of the European Union and other programs, America can avoid the hiccups that hampered early efforts.

As the effects of a warming climate become increasingly apparent and the costs of adaptation rise, inaction will become an untenable political position. Markets play to America’s strengths. As the first President Bush said about his policy of emissions markets for controlling acid rain, markets “harness the creativity and ingenuity of the private sector.” What could be more American than that? Just ask the Chinese.

Dirk Forrister is president and chief executive officer of the International Emissions Trading Association. Paul Bledsoe is a senior fellow in the energy and climate program at the German Marshall Fund of the United States.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/10/opinion/pollution-economics.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20130810&_r=0