On Friday Oct. 22 in Atherton, California, Elvis Costello is playing what is likely his first-ever concert with a dress code.
The "business attire" music venue is the home of Silicon Valley venture capital mogul Alan Salzman, CEO and managing director of Vantage Point Venture Partners. And if you think baseball playoff tickets are pricey, "general admission" for this special Elvis reception and concert is $500. Prices escalate from there, up to a cool $100,000 for a package of 10 VIP tickets, 10 regular tickets, and four backstage passes.
This is a very good thing.
It's a fundraiser for California's "No on Proposition 23" campaign, and it shows just how mobilized California's progressive business community has become against this ballot measure. As most know by now, Prop. 23 would suspend the state's landmark greenhouse gas reduction law, known as AB 32, until the state unemployment rate drops to 5.5 percent for four consecutive quarters -- which has happened only three times in 35 years. "So what is being sold as a short-term "suspension" of AB 32," say two UC-Berkeley environmental law experts, "looks more like a backhanded repeal."
Prop. 23's principal backers are Texas-based oil companies Tesoro and Valero, which both have operations in California. Supporters of the ballot measure claim that AB 32 is bad for business and job creation in the state -- the same argument advanced by opponents to climate regulations across the country, from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce on down. But here's the question: bad for whose business?
Certainly not Alan Salzman's. The venture capitalist-turned music impresario (for one day, anyway) runs a firm that's invested some $1 billion in more than 25 clean tech companies, such as Tesla Motors and BrightSource Energy, helping create hundreds of jobs in California and elsewhere. The consensus estimate is that half a million Californians now work in clean tech-related jobs, a great many of them under threat if Prop. 23 passes.
So this election-year battle is not about choosing between the economy and the environment. It's about choosing the new economy -- clean energy, energy efficiency, cleaner transportation, carbon reduction and the like -- over the old economy of fossil fuels and business-as-usual carbon emissions. It should be a pretty obvious choice for California in 2010. In economic development efforts around the country, from solar panel manufacturing in Ohio to cellulosic biofuels in Georgia, more and more states around the U.S. are making the choice as well.
And if big-bucks fundraisers with world-class music stars are an economic indicator, it's a good sign that Californians will make the right choice in November. Thanks Elvis.
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Oh. Spare. Me.
I apologise. "Consensus" is a word with nebulous meaning in the climate science religion-speak.
Actually, the law will hurt green jobs that are actually labour intensive. AB32 will kill off California biofuels in favor of natural gas interests--the latter emits less CO2.
Doubt me? Talk to anyone in Calif. biofuels.
That kind of rapacious Big Energy behavior is just as bad for us as all the other Big Energy behavior and it is ludicrous to pretend that Vantage Point is helping the environment. They are leveraging taxpayer assets that we had no choice but to hand over to them, for private profits - that is such a total SCAM.
If we were allowed access to our own $2 Billion, 200,000 CA families could have had FREE solar power for the next 40 years from our own rooftops - the EXACT amount of power Ivanpah will produce. We would still have our functioning ecosystem, our desert water, our $50 million, and our energy bill money, plus we would have twice as many jobs (all that profit wasted on "investors" would go into jobs instead), improved property values, better grid reliability and no dead tortoises.
If you care about the economy or the environment, point of use solutions are the answer, not Big Solar.
Tesoro is not an oil company, it is an oil refiner. I don't know what you mean by super Enrons but you obviously don't know much about the companies you are criticizing.
There were no quotes from Mr. Costello in the article.
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Lip Service - Elvis Costello
You left the motor running.
But I know you're so attractive.
Getting in some sharp practice.
You better not do anything reckless.
But everybody is going through the motions.
Everybody is going through the motions.
Are you really only going through the motions?
Lip service is all you'll ever get from me.
Lip service is all you'll ever get from me.
Lip service is all you'll ever get from me.
But if you change your mind
you can send it a letter to me
Don't make any sudden movements.
These are dangerous amusements.
When did you become so choosy?
Don't act like you're above me;
just look at your shoes.
[Repeat bridge and chorus]
But if you change your mind
you can send it a letter to me
But if you change your mind
you can send it a letter to me
But if you change your mind
you can send a little letter to me
R/ PRONESE