Southern California Edison (SCE) has recently announced that a Public Safety Power Shutoff (PSPS) is possible for some Santa Barbara County areas starting Friday, due to high wind conditions. The length of the outages is currently unknown and depends on weather conditions. Santa Barbara county urges residents, for all PSPS events, to be prepared for […]
crisis
Urban Housing Development in Santa Barbara: A symposium presented by the local UC Berkeley Community
On July 10th, 2019, the World Business Academy hosted a Global Citizens Club meeting focusing on housing solutions for a vibrant Santa Barbara. The incredible turnout at this event underscored how much our audience cares about making our community work well. Topics addressed in July included millennial housing, project affordability, and policy allowances. The panelists and […]
Rinaldo S. Brutoco to Appear on ‘Coast to Coast’ Radio Show Thursday night (Oct. 3)
SANTA BARBARA, California – Rinaldo S. Brutoco, noted Santa Barbara business leader, co-author of Freedom from Mid-East Oil, and futurist, will discuss the evolving crisis in the Middle East and its implications for the U.S. economy and the global environment and clean-energy options when he appears this week for a two-hour segment on the popular […]
Resiliency Through Repurposing
By Robert Perry, Director of Research In facing our climate crisis, a lot of emphasis is placed on adding to, or replacing infrastructure. While this impulse is a logical reaction in the transition to clean energy, a strategy to repurpose existing facilities should always be considered first as a means to accelerate the transition, while […]
The Resource Adequacy Hurdle to 100% Renewable Energy
By Robert Perry, Director of Research Over the years, I’ve written about Santa Barbara County’s energy resiliency issues, particularly for communities along the coastline in the Southern California Edison (SCE) service territory. I’ve also decried SCE’s antiquated Request for Offer (RFO) process that no longer works in a time when energy procurement means building hundreds […]
Whitepaper Published on The Methane Accelerator
On June 6, 2019, the World Business Academy released for publication a 31-page whitepaper addressing a global phenomenon it calls the “Methane Accelerator”: cumulative emissions from massive deposits of methane gas, sequestered for millennia in permafrost, glaciers and marine sediment, but which are now being released due to warmer atmospheric and ocean temperatures. For at […]
Some Good News on the Fracking Front
By Robert Perry For all of us following the onslaught of oil and gas proposals and attempts by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to open every acre of federal land in California to fracking, the sheer volume of battles can be daunting. I attended and spoke at the BLM public meeting at SBCC on […]
Methane: One More Reason for the Green New Deal
I think we all remember the horrific tragedy of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, an event brought closer to home through media and online resources showing real-time videos and estimates of the massive oil plume that ultimately spewed ~4.9 billion barrels (210 million gallons) of oil over a five-month period, affecting 68,000 square miles […]
Learn All About the Montecito Community Microgrid at a Public Meeting on Nov. 14
One of the most important ongoing projects of the World Business Academy is the Montecito Community Microgrid, an energy system that would deliver local energy daily and power emergency facilities during outages caused by extreme weather events and system failures. A Community Microgrid is a new approach for designing and operating an electric grid based […]
Reviving Retail in Santa Barbara Community Meeting
Community Solutions to the ‘Retail Apocalypse’ Santa Barbara retailers currently face a perfect storm due to recent local natural disasters that have added to the impact of e-commerce, national trends, neighborhood vacancies, Byzantine local regulations, and the high cost of doing business in Santa Barbara. The World Business Academy’s Global Citizens Club convened a panel […]
Unmaking America’s Water Crisis
Blue Revolution: Unmaking America’s Water Crisis, is required reading for anyone who wants to understand the growing U.S. water crisis.
Japan’s Nuclear Kamikazes: A Morality Tale of Energy Madness
In the final stages of World War II, Japan found young men willing to give their lives in suicidal missions against Allied warships. Scarves tucked around their necks blowing in the wind identified them as men willing to die for their country. The modern day kamikazes are the men who have been sent day after […]