Don't help, but help

DEAL SPIN: Berkshire Hathaway's MidAmerican Energy is building windmills under David Sokol.





Mr. Sokol is considered a top candidate to one day succeed Mr. Buffett, and his rising status at Berkshire puts a spotlight on his company's wind-power plans. MidAmerican has spent about $4 billion on wind projects and has billions more in the pipeline to finance wind and other alternative-energy projects around the country.

Sokol is CEO of MidAmerican Energy. Wind power will be viable if fossil fuel prices go higher, as Buffet is said to believe will happen.

Messrs. Buffett and Sokol aren't on an environmental crusade. MidAmerican owns a vast number of coal-fired power plants, among the biggest emitters of greenhouse gases. Electric-power companies in the U.S. produce about 40% of the country's energy-related carbon-dioxide emissions, according to Energy Department data.

Fair enough. They're in business to make money for their companies.

Earlier this year, Mr. Sokol testified before Congress against legislation supported by many environmentalists to establish a market to trade carbon credits, arguing it would "impose a huge and unacceptable double cost on customers."

Government should stay out of the market, for its presence is onerous. Banks and Wall Street said the same thing, o, three years ago.

Mr. Sokol, who has said the wind-power industry still requires government support, also is trying to solve one of the longstanding problems of alternative energy -- how to store excess energy when the wind is blowing and transmit energy when it isn't.

But whilst the government shoiuld stay out of the market, lest it hamper competition and the American people, it should subsidize the market this capitalist is in to make a profit. Curious logic it is: stay out, but help.

Working the railroad

“This is all happening because my father didn’t buy me a train set as a kid,” Mr. Buffett joked in an interview.







America’s best-known investor, Warren E. Buffett, is making his biggest bet yet on the nation’s economic future by buying, of all things, a railroad.

After deftly capitalizing on the financial crisis with a series of bold deals, Mr. Buffett on Tuesday agreed to buy the 131-year-old Burlington Northern Santa Fe Corporation.

If I recall correctly, that Santa Fe part of the conglomerated name is th eold, renown Hutchinson, Topeka and Santa Fe.

Even as the credit markets have improved and banks have become less skittish about lending, few companies can muster Mr. Buffett’s financial firepower. Berkshire will borrow $8 billion to supplement $8 billion in cash from its books, paying off the debt in three annual installments.

Although it has the cash, Berkshire will borrow, presumably for tax advantages.

The Journal's article had these interesting details:

On Sunday afternoon, Burlington also hired Evercore Partners and its chairman, Roger Altman -- in part because of Mr. Altman's long relationship with Burlington lead board member Ed Whitacre. Both men worked on deals involving SBC Communications, where Mr. Whitacre was CEO, and General Motors, where Mr. Whitacre is lead independent board member.

Interlocking ties.

Locomotive as Artistic Inspiration

No application of the harnessing of steam power rattled the status quo so much as the steam-powered locomotive. With each improvement, its speed and reach shattered limits of space and time. Millions of acres of wilderness were cleared for hundreds of railway lines. Timetables enslaved travelers to the clock as never before. (By 1883 American railroads had divided the country into four time zones, decades before the government made the concept official.) Stations and railroad cars forced people together even as they reinforced their division into classes.

Slide show.

G. Caillebotte - Le pont de l'Europe









Caillebotte - Landscape With Railroad Cutting
Edouard Manet - The Railway (The Gare Saint Lazare)," in which a seated governess looks up from her book to study us while a young girl in her care gazes through iron bars at a Parisian rail yard."

Thomas Talbot Bury: Coloured Views on the Liverpool and Manchester Railway









John Cooke Bourne - View of a steam locomotive crossing the Knaresborough viaduct, in Yorkshire.


O. Winston Link - "Hot Shot Eastbound at the Iaeger Drive In, Iaeger, West Virginia, 1956"