Monday, 03 January 2011 09:43
'What stands in the way of global access to financial services? It may come as a surprise, but the single biggest obstacle is cash. In short, cash is expensive.
The poor tend to live in an entirely cash-based economy. But banks find it too costly to sustain branches in disadvantaged areas to collect the small amounts of hard cash that poor people can save. So poor customers have to travel miles just to make a deposit – wasting time and running up transport costs.
We can’t make cash go away. But we can make it easier to transform cash into electronic information, which is all a bank account is, really. Once money is “de-materialized,” it can be sent around electronically at very low cost. The fastest, most convenient way to achieve this transformation globally is to use the stores that exist in every neighborhood and every village as banking surrogates.'
Monday, 03 January 2011 09:16
'The Obama administration will use government agencies and the Clean Air Act to push through its global warming agenda after failing in Congress. FoxNews.com reports that on Jan.2 new carbon limits will be set and the Environmental Protection Agency will then draw up regulations requiring companies to get permits to release greenhouse gases.
Fox said the administration, which points to a 2007 Supreme Court ruling for its authority, plans to have preliminary rules in place by the summer with final rules set for 2012. American Enterprise Institute scientist Ken Green told Fox the regulations are “job killers".'
Monday, 03 January 2011 09:01
'As we emerge, temporarily perhaps, from weeks of the coldest weather since records began – with snow disasters right round the northern hemisphere, from the US and Europe to China and Mongolia – more examples come to light of how the cost of extreme cold is far greater than that of warming. We already have a £9.6 billion backlog to cover repairs to roads damaged in previous winters, and the price of repairing the potholes and crumbling asphalt caused by this winter’s even more intense cold threatens to raise that by billions more (even though Government cuts will trim that budget by 15 per cent).
In Northern Ireland, 80,000 households were deprived of water by burst mains operated by the state-owned Northern Ireland Water. Yet as recently as October it published a strategic plan wholly obsessed by the need to transform its infrastructure to meet the challenge of global warming.'
Read more: As We Count the Cost of the Freeze, Government Prepares for Global Warming
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