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  • Failure of BankUnited shows troubles still persist

    Mr Kanas’s team agreed to pump $US900 million in new capital into the bank and to acquire $US12.7 billion of the bank’s assets and $US8.3 billion of certain deposits that are considered less risky.

    BankUnited’s collapse is a reminder of the troubled state of the FDIC’s deposit-insurance fund, the program that guarantees most deposits against the risk of a bank failing. BankUnited is the 34th bank to fail this year after 25 last year.

    The FDIC’s deposit insurance fund had just $US19 billion at the end of 2008 to backstop trillions of dollars in deposits. To replenish the fund, the agency is scheduled to vote on a controversial plan to assess higher fees against more than 8000 banks.

    In addition, President Obama signed a bill into law on Wednesday that allows the FDIC to borrow as much as $US100 billion from the Treasury Department to shore up its fund, a measure the FDIC had sought for months.

    BankUnited’s failure comes just as bankers, federal officials and many investors had been hoping the worst was over for the banking industry. The 19 biggest banks this month performed better than expected on government “stress tests”, and several large and midsize banks in recent weeks have successfully raised capital through public stock offerings.

    BankUnited, based on Coral Gables, is a high-profile victim of the banking crisis. Its problems stemmed largely from its forays into risky housing loans. The bank, founded in 1984, specialised in an exotic type of mortgage to people living outside the US who wanted to buy property in Florida. As of June 30, 2008, BankUnited was holding about $US1.4 billion of these so-called “non-resident alien” mortgages, representing 11.4 per cent of the bank’s total loan portfolio.

    Some investors had long questioned BankUnited’s emphasis on such loans, which primarily went to people living in Latin America who wanted a Florida home for vacation or investment purposes. Sceptics argued the loans were considerably riskier than mortgages to US residents because the loans didn’t finance borrowers’ primary residences.

    BankUnited holds about 2.1 per cent of deposits in Florida, according to the latest figures.

    As BankUnited struggled, it caused problems for the federal government. In March, the Treasury Department placed the acting head the Office of Thrift Supervision on leave amid allegations the agency allowed BankUnited to improperly report its financial condition as healthier than it was. The Treasury is still investigating the issue. Many people have called for the government to abolish the OTS because of its supervision of several banks that have failed in the past year, including Washington Mutual, IndyMac and Downey Savings & Loan.

    When word recently leaked that Mr Kanas and other investors were contemplating investing in BankUnited, markets cheered the news as a long-awaited sign investors were starting to tiptoe back into the beleaguered industry.

    The failure may douse those hopes. Investors were willing to pump money into BankUnited only after regulators seized it and agreed to protect investors against most losses on the bank’s troubled loans. That doesn’t bode well for other troubled banks looking to lure outside capital.

  • Nuns arrive at eco-convent and leave behind high-carbon habit

     

    Among the £4.7 million building’s green features are solar panels to provide hot water, a woodchip boiler that will be fuelled by locally-sourced trees and a roof covered in sedum grass to better insulate the buildings and attract local wildlife.

    Rainwater from some of the roofs will be collected and used to flush the toilets and, instead of an electrically-driven waste water treatment plant, the architects have installed a reedbed sewage system. The effluent from the monastery will filter through the reedbed and, after it is processed through natural anaerobic digestion, the resulting water will trickle out onto the surrounding land.

    And the basic materials for the building – everything from timber to stone – have been sourced as locally as possible.

    “A lot of building projects start out with all these environmental features and, by the value engineering stage, usually you’ve lost quite a few of them,” said project architect Gill Smith of Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios, winners of the 2008 Stirling Prize. “The nuns have been remarkably good at sticking with their principles and not letting them drift as other clients tend to do. The list they’ve ended up with is quite impressive.”

    The nuns moved from the Victorian splendour of Stanbrook Abbey in rural Worcestershire because, according to abbess Dame Andrea Savage, manual labour was overtaking monasticism at the site. “We’re running a big building, spending thousands of pounds that we don’t have on looking after the place and heating it with oil and gas, which isn’t good for the environment,” she said last year. “We’re here for the monastic life and it is being impinged upon.”

    The new monastery will give its new inhabitants broadband-ready bedrooms for up to 30 nuns, plus a church, library and other ancillary buildings. There is also space for up to 15 guests.

    Smith said the project had been a learning process for the nuns and the architects. “For them it was thinking about buildings in the way we think about them, and for us it was getting to grips with the monastic life. The building is their whole world, they’re there 24 hours a day all their lives and there’s no other building [we have built] that has to meet that challenge. You have to provide everything they could want in life, which is hard. You really want to create a variety of different worlds within it.”

  • Govt blocking witnesses from carbon trade inquiry: Joyce

     

    “This is the same Labor Party that talked about the Howard government taking the Senate for granted as a rubber stamp,” he said.

    “Now we find that once the pressure is on them, the first thing they do is start scripting so the Australian people can only hear one point of view.

    “I’ve got no problems with them bringing out all these people, but this is the same Labor Party that has truncated the inquiry.

    “We’re pressed into this incredibly tight time frame [and] we can’t actually get through the 11 pieces of legislation in time.”

    Job losses

     

    Meanwhile the Minerals Council of Australia says a new study shows the Government’s emissions trading scheme will cost the industry 23,500 jobs over the next decade.

    The study by Concept Economics predicts almost half the jobs lost will come from Queensland.

    Council chief executive Mitch Hooke says his organisation supports a reduction in carbon emissions, but he is convinced the Government’s scheme is fatally flawed.

  • SLOUCHING TOWARD GOLGOTHA

    To be cynically frank, the CCS plan has three big things going for it:

    ** First, after the stuff is pumped underground, it will be out of sight and out of mind, no one will know for sure where it is, and there will be no way to get it back. Problem solved. If it starts to leak out a few miles away from the injection site and the leakage is somehow miraculously discovered, chances are that nothing can be done about it, so we might as well forget the whole thing. It’s a done deal, so eat, drink, and be merry — just as we’ve been doing for the past 30 years.

    ** Second, with CCS as our “solution,” no one important has to change anything they’re now doing — the coal, oil, automobile, railroad, mining and electric power corporations can continue on their present path undisturbed — and no doubt they will reward Congress handsomely for being so “reasonable.” Everyone knows that’s how the system works. No one even bothers to deny it.

    ** Third, CCS cannot actually be tested; it will always require a leap of faith. Even though the goal is to keep CO2 buried in the ground forever, in human terms any test will have to end on some particular day in the not-too-distant future. On that day the test will be declared a “success” — but leakage could start the following day. So, given the goal of long-term storage, no short-term test can ever prove conclusive. CCS will always rest on a foundation of faith; and, in the absence of conclusive tests, those with the greatest persuasive powers ($$) have the upper hand.

    Two weeks ago the Germans inaugurated the world’s first coal-fired power plant designed to bury its CO2 in the ground as an experiment. As New Scientist magazine told us last March, “In Germany, only CCS can make sense of an energy policy that combines a large number of new coal-fired power stations with plans for a 40 per cent cut in CO2 emissions by 2020.” In other words, the Germans hitched their wagon to a CCS solution long before they designed the first experiment to see if it could work. With the future of the German economy dependent on the outcome, it seems unlikely that this first little experiment will be announced as a failure. Like us, the Germans are playing Russian roulette with the future of the planet.

  • Industries are Grappling With New Bill on Climate

     

    At a White House meeting Wednesday, members of President Barack Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board endorsed the central idea of the 900-plus page measure — to cap carbon emissions and require businesses to buy tradeable permits to pollute. The measure could create “green” jobs in the U.S. while reducing harmful pollution that might be causing global climate change, executives in the group said. They included General Electric Co. Chief Executive Jeffrey Immelt, who sat next to the president.

    Mr. Obama said he’s “excited about the opportunity” to develop such a system and that “we’ve seen some great progress this week” in the U.S. House of Representatives.

    The bill has been put forward by U.S. Reps. Henry A. Waxman, (D., Calif.) and Edward J. Markey (D., Mass.). It’s prospects look good in the House, but it could face a tougher time in the Senate. Still, the bill is the most viable yet to tackle climate change.

    If adopted, it would confront big sectors of the economy with potentially costly challenges. The bill requires that emissions of carbon dioxide, methane and other gases linked to climate change be cut by 83% from their 2005 levels by 2050, long after most current members of Congress will have left office. The planned reduction is all the more ambitious considering that U.S. greenhouse gas emissions grew by 17% between 1990 and 2007.

    To drive businesses and power generators to use less oil and coal and slash emissions of other gases, the Waxman-Markey bill would make businesses acquire pollution permits, which they could use to cover their emissions and sell any spares.

    The current draft of the bill would give away up to 85% of those permits over the next 20 years. Still, instituting a cap and trade system would start the process of putting a price on emitting carbon dioxide. The bill’s supporters say that is enough to start driving the technological innovation and investment needed to move away from fossil fuels.

    “Putting a price on carbon is the most important thing we can do,” Silicon Valley venture capitalist John Doerr told reporters after the meeting of the president’s advisory board. Mr. Doerr, a partner at, Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers, is one of a number of tech figures who have invested some of the wealth they earned during the Internet boom in clean-energy ventures that could get a boost from the Waxman-Markey proposal.

    Critics of Waxman-Markey, most of them Republicans but also some Democrats, say it is a tax by another name applied in a complex and costly way.

    A Congressional Budget Office analysis of climate change policy estimated that price increases associated with a 15% cut in carbon dioxide emissions would cost the average U.S. household $1,600 a year. The CBO analysis said low income households would shoulder a larger burden, as would families in coal dependent regions such as the Ohio Valley.

    Harvard University economics professor Martin Feldstein questioned during the meeting with Mr. Obama whether the price might be too high for U.S. consumers, but said giving away too many pollution credits to utilities could undermine the goal of reducing emissions.

    “You have to raise the price to consumers to get them to cut back,” Mr. Feldstein said. “I have a hard time understanding the give-away strategy.”

    Lawmakers say they would compensate consumers for the added burden through tax credits and direct government subsidies. The Waxman-Markey bill would use the states to funnel monthly payments to low-income households, defined as those eligible for food stamps or with gross income up to 150% of the poverty line.

    But the Waxman-Markey bill is more than just cap and trade. The proposal would establish requirements that utilities buy at least 12% of their electricity from renewable sources such as windmills, solar panels and geothermal technology.

    Another section promotes “large scale” programs to spur demand for electric vehicles with incentives for buying plug-in cars and building charging stations.

    The proposed bill offers auto makers several forms of assistance to make the shift to lower-carbon cars. They include as much as $50 billion in loans under an Energy Department program to spur advanced vehicle development and up to $4 billion for subsidies to consumers who trade in older vehicles for more efficient models.

    In addition, auto makers would get 3% of the free pollution allowances through 2017 and 1% from 2018 through 2025 — tied to investments in electric vehicles and other advanced technology.

    The proposal would offer rebates to spur demand for appliances that are not only energy efficient, but also come equipped with “smart grid” technology that would allow a dishwasher to know the most economical time of day to run based on variable electric rates. Retailers would get incentives to push highly efficient appliances to consumers.

    The act would order the Department of Energy to see to it that building codes are amended to make new buildings 30% more efficient by 2010 and 50% more efficient by 2016. The act would even establish new efficiency standards for “portable light fixtures,” also known as lamps.

  • Taiwan’s solar stadium 100% powered by the sun

     

    Building a new stadium is always a massive undertaking that requires millions of dollars, substantial physical labor, and a vast amount of electricity to keep it operating. Toyo Ito’s design negates this energy drain with a stunning 14,155 sq meter solar roof that is able to provide enough energy to power the stadium’s 3,300 lights and two jumbo vision screens. To illustrate the incredible power of this system, officials ran a test this January and found that it took just six minutes to power up the stadium’s entire lighting system!

    The stadium also integrates additional green features such as permeable paving and the extensive use of reusable, domestically made materials. Built upon a clear area of approximately 19 hectares, nearly 7 hectares has been reserved for the development of integrated public green spaces, bike paths, sports parks, and an ecological pond. Additionally, all of the plants occupying the area before construction were transplanted.

    Non-sports fans in the community have a lot to jump up and down for as well. Not only does the solar system provide electricity during the games, but the surplus energy will also be sold during the non-game period. On days where the stadium is not being used, the Taiwanese government plans to feed the extra energy into the local grid, where it will meet almost 80% of the neighboring area’s energy requirements. Overall, the stadium will generate 1.14 million KWh per year, preventing the release of 660 tons of carbon dioxide into atmosphere annually.

    • This article was shared by our content partner Inhabitat, part of the Guardian Environment Network