たかがレジ袋、されどレジ袋

えげれすの首相は偉いっす。

わしはレジ袋っ拒否派っす。

最近馴染みのコンビニでは、袋くれません、、、、涙；



http://www.jiji.com/jc/c?g=int_30&k=2011100300363

レジ袋削減、義務付けも＝スーパーに警告－英首相
　【ロンドン時事】英国のキャメロン首相は３日までに、減少を続けていた買い物客のレジ袋の使用量が昨年、５％弱増加したことを受け、削減を義務付ける法律施行の可能性もあるとスーパーなどの小売業界に警告した。
　昨年買い物客に利用されたレジ袋は計６８億枚前後で、前年比３億３３００万枚も増えた。英国では２００６年に環境活動家らがレジ袋利用を控えるよう呼び掛ける運動を始めて以降、使用量が急減していたが、一転して増えたという。（2011/10/03-14:14）

何でガス狂に天ガス要請なのかねぇ

http://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/html/20110928/t10015898791000.html

枝野経済産業大臣は、日本ガス協会の会長らと懇談し、原子力の代替エネルギーとして期待されている天然ガスの活用を進めていくため供給網を強化するよう協力を求めました。

この中で枝野経済産業大臣は「原発事故を受けて、エネルギー供給の観点から天然ガスの重要性が高まっている。温室効果ガスの排出を少なく抑えて活用できるエネルギーとして活用をさらに進めていきたい」と述べました。そのうえで枝野大臣は、日本ガス協会に対して、天然ガスをより安く調達することや広域的なパイプラインの整備などを通じて供給網を強化するよう協力を求めました。これに対して日本ガス協会側は、天然ガス確保については民間だけで取り組むには限界があるとして、政府の支援を改めて要請したということです。懇談のあと枝野大臣は記者団に対して「資源確保は諸外国の政府が相手になるので政府としてもしっかりと努力していきたい」と述べました。さらに枝野大臣は、すべてのコストに一定の利益を上乗せする「総括原価方式」と呼ばれる料金制度が、電気料金と同じくガス料金でも採用されていることについて、「電力の方で変わっていくのであれば、同じようなシステムを持つ他の分野についての検討も進めていく」と述べ、将来的な見直しの可能性を示唆しました。

いぶし銀も曇る？ソリンドラで傷ついた名声。。。

http://gigaom.com/cleantech/solyndras-hearing-introducing-doe-loan-chief-jonathan-silver/


Solyndra’s hearing: Introducing DOE Loan Chief Jonathan Silver

The latest news out of the Solyndra scandal is that Solyndra’s CEO Brian Harrison, and CFO, W.G. Stover, Jr., won’t attend the House Energy & Commerce’s hearing on Wednesday, but say they will testify the week of September 19. I don’t have any details on why they won’t show up this week, but the remaining two witnesses who will testify in front of the committee tomorrow are Jonathan Silver, Executive Director of the Loans Programs Office for the DOE, and Jeffrey Zients, the Deputy Director of the Office of Management and Budget.

We’ve interviewed Silver many times at GigaOM, including most recently at our Green:Net 2011 event in April 2011. Silver joined the DOE in late 2009, and was formerly the managing general partner at Washington, D.C.-based firm Core Capital Partners. I’ve embedded the Green:Net video interview below (which occurred in April 2011), and since we particularly asked him about Solyndra in the interview, I’ve transcribed his answers below (which occur around 9:20 minutes into the interview):

GigaOM: Let’s look back to the very first loan guarantee under this program, the Solyndra deal, which happened before you joined the program…

Silver: Thank you for saying that…

GigaOM: But it has also come under some criticism. What has the Department of Energy learned from that deal. Are there any places where your team now would have done things differently now.

Silver: Let me take a step back if I can and sort of position the discussion around that particular transaction because I think it’s been badly misunderstood in public discussions. First of all the selection of Solyndra was completely appropriate. It’s a very innovative technology that’s total cost of ownership is very dramatically less on an installed basis. It was exactly the kind of project we intended to fund.

The second is that things have not gone wildly awry, though things have been reported that way. The company did in fact use our financing to build a second fab, which is what they were supposed to do with it. They did it on time and under budget. They said they’d hire 3,000 people to build it and they did. Somewhere in the dialogue, what got lost was, they came out at one point and said that we expect our plant and our suppliers to hire an additional 1,000 people. When in fact what they did end up doing was they laid off some workers who worked in an older prototype plant even though the net total employment in the company was 300 greater than it was before when we financed.

This is also not a startup. This company will do about — it’s been reported, publicly, so I’m not saying anything that’s not a matter of public record — $140 million in revenue this year, that number doubled from the year before, and it doubled from the year before that. They’ve sold hundreds of thousands of solar panels here and abroad. So I’ve been in the investment business a long long time and I’ve never seen a company that went straight up without bumps along the way. This company has had some bumps, but I think things are moving in the right direction. And I expect that other projects in the portfolio will have some bumps and that those will be overcome, too. It’s inherent in the nature of building out innovative technologies at scale.

GigaOM: So no lessons learned from that deal…

Silver: Well, there are quite a few. I think we structure transactions a little bit differently now — we’re at 28 into them, and that was deal #1. We certainly have more human and technical and skill-based resources than we did originally. We are looking for certain kinds of things as we’ve worked our way through an inner agency process, which includes a review of these transactions by the OMB and Treasury. We’ve begun to be able to develop some policy frameworks for these things. So, yeah, I think there are quite a lot of lessons learned that have already begun to be implemented in the portfolio.

Here’s other interviews and articles we’ve done with Silver: