Financial Times (June 14)
“The slow pace of the shift away from fossil fuels is evidence of their compelling advantages in terms of cost and convenience. Tackling the threat of catastrophic climate change cannot rely on wind and solar power alone but requires multiple changes, including a shift within fossil fuels away from coal towards gas.”
Tags: Advantages, Climate change, Coal, Convenience, Cost, Fossil fuels, Gas, Shift, Solar, Wind power
USA Today (November 9)
Instead of urgent action to remove defective air bags from vehicles, “air bag maker Takata and its biggest customer, Honda, conducted glacial, piecemeal recalls that have left drivers in jeopardy.” Why the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) hasn’t done more remains a mystery, though it’s clear why the other parties have dallied. “The problem might pose an existential threat” for Takata. “And for Honda, finding and replacing the faulty air bags—installed in many models for many years—imposes a massive cost.”
The Economist (September 20)
“The cost of halting Ebola’s spread is also rising exponentially. In August the World Health Organisation estimated that it would take nine months and cost $490m to contain Ebola. Now it reckons the cost has risen to over $1 billion. The longer the world prevaricates, the harder and costlier it will be to contain this outbreak.”
Tags: August, Containment, Cost, Ebola, Exponentially, Outbreak, Spread, WHO
The Economist (July 26)
“ONE trillion dollars. That may be the cost to Russian investors of Vladimir Putin’s rule…. The calculation stems from the fact that investors regard Russian assets with suspicion. As a result, Russian stocks trade on a huge discount to much of the rest of the world, with an average price-earnings ratio (p/e) of just 5.2. At present, the Russian market has a total value of $735 billion. If it traded on the same p/e as the average emerging market (12.5), it would be worth around $1.77 trillion.”
Tags: Assets, Cost, Discount, Emerging market, Investors, Market, P/E, Putin, Russia, Suspicion, Trillion
USA Today (March 10)
The fruitless search to locate the missing Malaysia Airlines flight, let alone determine what caused its fate, highlights just how outdated the black-box is in a world of 24/7 connections. This “disappearance is a powerful argument for upgrading black-box technology to allow planes to live-stream vital information when they get into trouble—a suggestion that airlines have resisted because of the cost.”
Tags: Airlines, Black-box, Cost, Disappearance, Flight, Malaysia Airlines, Missing, Outdated, Search, Stream, Technology, Upgrade
Wall Street Journal (July 15)
“India’s state-run telephone company delivered its last telegram on Sunday. We are told an era is ending, as if mankind’s desire to communicate isn’t ageless.” For 163 years, telegrams served a purpose in India, but e-mail, SMS and Twitter are increasingly filling the need. Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited had been losing approximately $23 million annually on telegrams since volume dropped to 5,000 daily “from 160,000-odd before smart phones and email.” In the U.S., Western Union eliminated telegrams in 2006 for similar reasons. Ironically, the short Twitter format of “140 characters pushes the limits of verbosity in a telegram,” but of course at greater speed and zero cost.
Tags: Cost, E-mail, End, Era, India, Smart phones, SMS, Speed, Telegram, Telephone, Twitter, U.S., Volume, Western Union
Bloomberg (May 26)
Solar is sliding down the cost curve even as cell efficiency climbs. Solar may soon beat the electricity rates set by utilities. “The cost of solar cells, the main component in standard panels, has fallen 21 percent so far this year, and the cost of solar power is now about the same as the rate utilities charge for conventional power in the sunniest parts of California, Italy and Turkey.”
Tags: Cost, Efficiency, Electricity, Solar, Utilities
