Jan
31
Hawaii, D.C., and clean energy
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So much news is self-announced by the principals these days — candidacies for office, corporate earnings reports, protest demonstrations – that reporters often function as editors, assessing the value of what comes in over the transom rather than going out looking for news. Worse, we can behave like hung-over art critics, complaining that what was handed to us on a silver platter didn’t have much flavor and the portions were too small.
I’m as bad as anyone else — just this week I sent an email to a P.R. person asking questions about her news release which amounted to an indirect criticism of all the vague terms she used. (A computer security company wanted to say how good it was, but stuck to generalities about “solutions” rather than say what the heck they offer. Sorry, it’s a pet peeve.)
The Honolulu Advertiser editorialized this morning that this week’s clean energy initiative, announced by Gov. Lingle and Andy Karsner, assistant secretary of energy for energy efficiency and renewable energy, was pretty thin gruel.
By chance I had Karsner on “Sunrise” this morning so I told him what the editorial said and invited him to offer a specific example of what might happen as a result of the alliance.
No specifics were forthcoming, so I guess the Advertiser makes a good point, but on the other hand I get the impression that the Bush administration really does see Hawaii as a useful test-bed for new energy ideas, and Karsner did give one specific reason for this that I hadn’t thought of earlier.
Solar power advocates tell me that Hawaii is the perfect place to show what solar can do because it’s so often sunny here and because fossil fuel bills are so high here. “If it’s gonna work anywhere, it’s gonna work here,” one guy said.
How many places have not only loads of sun but also loads of wind, loads of waves, and loads of hot magma to heat steam?
Now here’s the extra reason to nurture alternative energies in Hawaii.
Secretary Karsner says part of Hawaii’s appeal is that people are always traveling through Hawaii who can see these technologies at work. An idea that works here gets seen by many, probably while they’re in a good mood because they’re at least partially on vacation. What better, what more beautiful place, to see swirling wind turbines or glistening solar panels?
The federal government already has all kinds of programs to defray some economic costs of alternative energies. But Karsner figures we’re past the experimental stage now, and it’s time to do commercial projects and show people that these technologies work.
Which is, of course, precisely what’s happening. Wal-Mart this week let me view the solar panels Sun Edison installed on the roof of the Keeaumoku Sam’s Club, cheek-by-jowl with the air conditioning units that use all that power. Costco then put out its own plaintive press release saying it already had solar panels on its Kona and Kauai stores, Hawaii’s biggest, thankyouverymuch.
Hoku Scientific plans to build the state’s largest solar power farm near Campbell Industrial Park. An Ewa builder is offer rooftop solar panels as a new home option. A Hawaii roofing contractor is selling solar panels that ARE rooves, so the whole roof qualifies for alternative energy tax breaks. Alexander & Baldwin, Maui Land & Pineapple and other local companies with agriculture experience plan crops that can be made into ethanol. Maui Electric has a plan to test wave action power. New wind power turbines are up on Maui and the Big Island.
Jan
28
The four seasons — of Hawaii
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Somewhere there may be a place with four distinct seasons, each of them about a quarter of a year long, but I have never lived there. But all locales have seasons, and I like Hawaii’s very much.
Chesapeake Bay country and Washington, D.C., where I was spawned, has four distinct seasons, but of highly unequal lengths. Summer and winter are long and miserable. Spring lasts for about two weeks while the cherry blossoms are out. Fall comes around Oct. 15.
In Chicago it is customary to say that there are two seasons — winter and construction season.
In New Hampshire there is a mud season.
I have pondered how to parse Hawaii weather and come up with four seasons — two that form a backdrop to the calendar, interrupted from time to time by two others.
Spring begins on Easter and lasts until Thanksgiving, interrupted, sometimes more than once and sometimes for weeks at a time, by Kona Season, in which the trade winds die down and the entire state feels like the inside of your car after you parked on the Ala Moana sun desk with the windows up.
Fall lasts from Thanksgiving until Easter, interrupted, sometimes more than once and sometimes for weeks, by Storm Season. Storm Season can be windy, rainy or both, but it feels a lot colder, especially if you never close your windows.
Am I getting this right, or should Windy Season and Rainy Season be two separate interruptions of the prevailing cool season?
And how can we get one of those construction seasons?
Jan
27
Did Jerome do this?
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Jerome Kerviel, the trader for Societe Generale who ran up $7.2 billion in losses, is now being blamed, or credited, with singlehandedly causing the Federal Reserve Board to undertake its biggest cut in interest rates ever, an emergency action that will make houses more affordable in Hawaii and calm down the affluent mainlanders we rely on to take expensive vacations here.
Societe Generale, the second biggest bank in France and not the one that owns First Hawaiian Bank (the biggest, BNP Paribas, owns First Hawaiian parent BancWest), denies that Kerviel’s trades moved markets that much. But Societe Generale has already misled us about Kerviel, whom it initially portrayed as some kind of criminal mastermind but who now turns out to be an inept nebbish who happened to know from a previous assignment in the audit department how to cover his mistakes by faking paperwork for opposite trades from the ones he was actually making.
The New York Times over the weekend had no trouble finding stock market analysts who felt that the markets were indeed much affected by the bank’s frantic efforts on Martin Luther King Day to get out of the positions Kerviel took. I’m just reporter and explainer, no expert on the stock market, and even I said in a blog post last week that European and Asian markets tanked Monday without any new bad economic news.
Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, who went into the office to work that day even though it was a federal holiday, canceled a trip and set up an emergency meeting with the other Fed governors. The result was the three quarter percent cut in both the federal funds rate, which the Fed has used in recent years to push other rates, and the discount rate, its former favorite mechanism for doing the same thing, the latter underlining the message sent by the former.
Societe Generale, which had recently been hailed by financial analysts as being well-run, based on performance figures that we now know were skewed by Kerviel’s shenanigans, says it is conducting an internal inquiry to learn how Kerviel managed to fake trades for so long without anyone noticing. It’s quite an embarrassment. The whole idea of giving your money to others to invest is that they’re more careful with it, or more able, than you are. Like the subprime mortgage default crisis, this undermines confidence in the whole system by conveying the impression that a lot of people in the financial world behaved in a slapdash way and, when big trouble arose, threw up their hands like it couldn’t be helped.
For me, the issue isn’t whether Jerome caused the stock market panic last week that led to interest rates being cut. It’s whether investigations will identify any particular Jacques-ass at Societe Generale who should be held accountable for insufficient oversite and perhaps be cut loose, sans “parachute d’or.”
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