Articles by praktike

Is the ‘creative class’ driving green building?

Worldchanger Jamais Cascio has a long, linktastic post about Richard Florida and his argument that there is an identifiable "creative class" of mobile workers that values, well, urbanism: a high quality of life, culture diversity and tolerance, thick labor markets, etc.

I live in Pittsburgh, where Florida got his start, so I'm well acquainted with his ideas and his, ahem, penchant for self-publicity. Unfortunately, Florida doesn't actually delve into the relationship between the environment and thriving cities; instead he uses a generalized quality of life measure of somewhat dubious reliability (it's hard to quantify this stuff).

So I'm glad that Jamais is looking beyond Florida's initial focus and talking about sustainability and the prospect that the "creative class is taking on a distinctly Viridian shade of green." Jamais looks at the top cities on Florida's creative index and wonders if it's the creative class that's driving the growth of LEED-certified green buildings. From my experience here in Pittsburgh, where the city recently unveiled a massive and beautiful LEED-certified convention center, it's actually the presence of several likeminded progressive foundations that has been decisive in these early years. The irony is that the wealth built up during Pittsburgh's famous period of rapid industrial growth--which led to Pittsburgh's equally-famous moniker as the "Smoky City"--is now the primary catalyst for a green renaissance.

Oil Wednesday

Macroeconomic analyst Barry Ritholtz is blogging about oil and markets over at The Big Picture. And he's got investment advice: cancer treatment in China is going to be big business sometime in the near future. He's got a lot of charts and posts, so be sure to look around.

The military base loophole?

Via the Oil Drum, I see that President Bush is "encouraging new oil refineries be built at closed military bases."

Speaking to small business leaders on Wednesday, Bush will call on federal agencies to encourage construction of new oil refineries at the sites of former military bases closed in recent years.

The agencies would work with states, local communities and potential investors to encourage the use of the sites, the administration officials said.

The lack of adequate refining capacity is frequently cited by experts as one reason why gasoline prices have surged dramatically in recent years. No new refineries have been built in recent years even though the demand for gasoline has risen.

Hmmm.

UPDATE: The Pentagon press release is out now, which indicates that this wasn't just some off-the-cuff remark.

China’s emerging energy policy

A pseudonymous guest author on Winds of Change looks at China's quest for oil, its tentative relationship with Russia, and the potential for friction between those powers and the United States.

Meanwhile, Jim, a retired engineer who writes on energy topics, has a good post about China's growing realization that it needs to broaden its approach beyond searching for imported oil.