The Grid: Energy, Resources, Environment, Sustainability | Bloomberg

How’s climate change a risk to me? This simple question has gone unanswered for too long.

Robert Rubin knows a thing or two about economic risk. As Treasury Secretary to President Clinton, Rubin advocated for balanced budgets through a combination of tax increases and spending cuts -- Rubinomics for short. While at Treasury he helped formulate the administration's responses to financial crises in Mexico, Russia and East Asia. The administration's personnel and policies have drawn increased scrutiny in recent years as Wall Street tries to make sense of the 2008 crisis.

Good morning, folks. Friday, which seems to come around only once every week, is here again. Here's some reading to mark the occasion:

• Extreme Weather Wreaking Havoc on Food as Farmers Suffer (Bloomberg)
  
• This warped map shows global warming’s biggest offenders (Atlantic)
  
• Climate protection may cut world GDP 4% by 2030, UN says (Bloomberg)
  
• Solar on a grand scale: big power plants coming online in the West (Washington Post)
  
• All that remained of 100 elephants: a ton of ivory turned into trinkets (NY Times)
  
• Brands shouldn’t be criticized for trying to tell their sustainability stories (Guardian)
  
• Toxic Mercury Pollution May Rise with Arctic Meltdown (Scientific American)
  
• Does Keystone XL Have a Place in the Oil-by-Rail Safety Debate? (Inside Climate News)
  
• Miners Chopping $10 Billion Search Bodes Next Price Boom (Bloomberg)
  
• Sustainability is better business – and we can prove it (Guardian)
  

What are you reading?

Good morning. Today: 2013 Oscar nominations offer a welcome distraction from "carbon dioxide removal" technology.

• World may have to suck gases from air to meet climate goals: UN (Reuters)
  
• How Wall Street can solve the climate crisis (Mother Jones)
  
• Climate change: The case of the missing heat (Nature)
  
• Company in West Virginia spill cited in issues at second site (Associated Press)
  
• Renewable energy at $254 billion? Make it a clean trillion (The Grid)
  
• Tony Fadell Q&A: Why I sold Nest to Google (Fortune)
  
• Tricks of the Trade (UCS Report)
  
• Why so many emerging megacities remain so poor (Atlantic Cities)
• BP sees renewables outpacing fossil fuels, eclipsing nuclear (Bloomberg)
  
• Far west got drier last year, data shows (New York Times)
  

How about you?

Billionaire bankers gathered at the United Nations yesterday to call for more investment in renewable energy -- $1 trillion a year, to be exact.

It won’t be easy. Global investment in renewable energy fell 11 percent in 2013 to $254 billion, according to data released by Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF), casting a shadow over the notion of a “clean trillion.”

Bloomberg BNA – Democrats beat back efforts from Republicans to include provisions in a fiscal year 2014 appropriations package that would have limited President Barack Obama's ability to implement his climate action plan, according to the White House.

Matt Lehrich, an assistant press secretary at the White House, told Bloomberg BNA in a statement that all of the “many” riders to the $1.1 trillion appropriations package that would have “gutted” Obama's climate action plan were eliminated from the final bill.

Greetings from New York, where we're busy picking out ties for tomorrow's climate and investment conference at the United Nations.

• West Virginia Acknowledges It Had No Plan for Freedom Spill (Charleston Gazette)
• Omnibus Thwarts Obama on Overseas Coal Plant Funding Limits (National Journal)
• China, World's Top Global Emitter, Is Best on Climate Change: Figueres (Bloomberg)
• A Century Later, the Expensive Lesson of Reversing the Chicago River (Atlantic Cities)
• What I Learned from Six Months of GMO Research: None of It Matters (Grist)
• Top iPhone Designer Now Works for the Google Grid (Bloomberg)
• Grappling With Sea-Level Rise, Sooner Not Later (New York Times)
• California Drought: What's Causing It? (San Jose Mercury News)
• The Monster Hurricanes of the Future Won't Be Where You Think (Fast Company)
• Shivering Cattle Signal Higher McDonald's Beef Cost (Bloomberg)
• Should You Drink Coffee Before or After Learning a Task? (Scientific American)

How about you?

Most of our homes are still operated by dumb technology with clumsy on/off switches. There are really only a few mainstream success stories of the so-called “Internet of things,” the idea that plugging our offline worlds into the Internet will make our lives better.

Google just bought one of them, for $3.2 billion.

Governor Chris Christie apologized to New Jersey last week after it was revealed that aides ordered busy commuter highway lanes shut for four days in September to punish a local mayor. The ensuing gridlock paralyzed the town of Fort Lee and, in at least four cases, prevented emergency units from getting to people in need.

The incident has caused moral outrage — for "pettiness and vindictiveness in doses usually relegated to the Facebook pages of Mean Girls," according to Bloomberg View's Francis Wilkinson — and could short circuit Christie's presidential ambitions.

Ask a bunch of New Yorkers where they spend their money: apartments, cars, vacation lodgings, maybe designer handbags. In the new American “sharing economy,” these can all be enjoyed at a fraction of their normal cost. Just not if you’re a New Yorker.

Bloomberg News’s Aki Ito and Jeff Kearns recently wrote about the increasing number of websites where people rent out their stuff. Going away for the weekend? Why not rent out your apartment? Not using your car much? Let someone else. Services like Airbnb, RelayRides and DogVacay are on track to account for “at least a single-digit percentage” of GDP in five years, said Arun Sundararajan, a professor at the Stern School of Business. In America’s $16 trillion economy, that’s enough to make the $2 billion currently invested in such startups seem puny.

Bloomberg BNA -- Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) is setting aside time at his party's weekly caucus lunch in the Capitol to focus solely on climate change, a senior Senate aide said Jan. 9, in hopes of one day reviving a bill to cut carbon dioxide emissions and better defend President Barack Obama's climate efforts from Republican attacks.

Reid reserves “a permanent spot” for the climate issue each week when Senate Democrats sit down for their hour-plus policy lunches, the aide told Bloomberg BNA.