Lump of coal

The Denver Post delivered a lump of coal in its editorial pages on Sunday, an op-ed piece by Daniel Firger who gave "Colorado citizens" some bad advice.

"What can be done?" Firger asks rhetorically about improving Colorado's already limited dependence on coal as an energy source. "Colorado citizens can push to phase out dirty coal, not just in the state's power plants but also in its mines and transmission lines. ... No state is better suited to lead this charge."

Nonsense.

Colorado ought to be leading the charge to use every energy source available to it not only to wean the United States off foreign sources of energy, but also to solve the world's climate problems by cleaning up its continued use of all fossil fuels.

Firger, associate director of the Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University in New York, offers faint praise to the state for its efforts to clean up its energy markets, but suggests it go further to eliminate "dirty coal" from its industry mix.

Nonsense.

Firger evidently missed James Fallows' article in the December Atlantic Monthly that recognizes "dirty coal" will continue to be a worldwide source of energy and should be as long as efforts continue to clean up its dump of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. It's cheap and provides jobs worldwide, including in Colorado.

Colorado Public Utilities Commissioners also must have missed the article before voting earlier this month to force Xcel Energy to reduce its use of coal to fire up six metro-area power plants. Not that the vote isn't healthy for the state; it just seemed uninformed.

Colorado coal miners would argue that technology is catching up to a sustainable use of coal to produce electricity -- adding that jobs and wages could be preserved if state officials would take cognizance of such developments.

Environmentalists in Colorado tend to be all-or-nothing types, and their influence on state government has been overwrought for the past four years. For the new Hickenlooper administration, it's time to balance that act.

Starting up a small-business chamber

Chaos. That's how John Wren, a long-time small-business advocate in metro Denver, describes his recent attempts to start a new group, a Small Business Chamber of Commerce. It could eventually go statewide.

Wren obtained the registered name for the Small Business Chamber of Commerce recently, and wanted to add the new group to the collection of entities he uses to help small business owners talk out their problems and processes. So far, those groups include regular sessions of the Idea Cafe, when speakers share their startup experiences, and Franklin Circles, named after Ben, which gather active entrepreneurs together.

So he started a Facebook page, http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=145283622175466&ref=ts, and put a meeting notice in the Denver Post that quickly gathered more than 700 prospective chamber members, and called down the Facebook security gods in the process to slow down his explosive recruitment.

Wren called it "Facebook crankiness," but his formation of the chamber goes on, and the quick response he has received suggests the hunger in Colorado for some kind of effective small-business leadership. 

There's no telling how it will all work out for Wren. He is hyper-active promoting his meetings on Facebook, Twitter, in the newspaper, and any other venue he can reach; but he told me he has "some people" working on taming the Internet glut he has going currently. That might also hone the mission of the new chamber as well as the services it might be able to offer small businesses.

He said the ultimate goal of the chamber is to lower Colorado's unemployment rate through small-buisness hiring. If you want to join the crowd, go to the URL shown above and sign up.

If you want to go to a meeting, attend the gathering at Panera Bread, East 13th Avenue and Grant Street, near downtown, at 2 p.m. Friday.

Pike Research, a worldwide toddler

In less than two years, Pike Research in Boulder has grown legs in the clean-tech analyst industry, and toddled off to Washington D.C., London, South Korea and other parts of the Asia/Pacific.

Clint Wheelock, founder and the sole principal of the firm, says the company is doing that with about 40 people, 25 full-time employees and another 15 contractors. That's a small business that the new governor's economic-development administration should keep an eye on.

"Things have really been moving quickly," said Wheelock, after announcing the opening of the Washington office last week. "Faster than I orginally thought," and despite the national and global recessions.

But clean-tech, a worldwide industry that itself is in its infancy, is like that. Reaching out, growing fast, and learning quickly, without much help from any particular mentor, unless the Chinese government can be considered some kind of rich uncle.

Pike Research, according to its own press releases, "is a market research and consulting firm that provides in-depth analysis of global clean technology markets ... [including the] Smart Energy, Clean Transportation, Clean Industry and Building Efficiency sectors."

Wheelock said the opening of offices in Washington and London adds the fuel-cells sector to the firm's expertise. It's "a big new focus for us, and although fuel cells have been around for a long time, we really think the industry is on the cusp of some real growth -- for probably the first time, despite a lot of (earlier)talk."

"We have specialists in smart-grid and renewable energy, and in energy-efficient buildings and in clean transportation, including electric vehicles and other alternate-fuel vehicles," Wheelock said.

The analysts write research reports that include market size for a particular area of clean-tech operations, like software for smart-grid electricity distribution, Pike's latest research report. The reports estimate current and future market size and segmentation. That latest report, for example, predicts software and services for smart-grid technology will increase from a "relatively small" $356 million annual market in 2010 to $4.2 billion in annual revenue by 2015.

Pike sells that kind of advice in a single report -- "What we call a basic license and which is essentially one to five users within an organization," Wheelock said -- for $3,500. "There's also an enterprise license for large companies that want to post it on their corporate intranet, and that's typically 1.5 times the basic license, so in a typical case it would be $5,250" for an enterprise.

Pike sells its large clients subsciptions that allow access to its analysts for consulting and custom research. Wheelock said the "bulk" of the firm's revenue comes from subscription sales.

"A lot of the larger clients," he said, "are the large multi-national technology and energy companies that have an ongoing need for this, and so they'll sign up for a subscription or multiple subscriptions."

Opening the Washington office has been on Wheelock's radar since he started the company with his own savings. A London office is also in the future, and probably South Korea, Wheelock said.

Big market-research firms have retrenched during the economic downturn, he noted, but that has given Pike an opportunity to establish itself as a brand name for clean-tech analysis.

"The level of competitive intensity is very low, and much lower than I expected," he said. "One of the key things that we're trying to do is take advantage of that competitive vacuum and really assert ourselves as the authority on several of these key emerging areas....

"I absolutely anticipate that there will be a lot more intense competition in a couple of years, and I think we're just trying to get ourselves in a good position as the leader in the States before that happens," Wheelock said.

"It seems to be working very well."

Eco-devo transition to start in mid-December

Colorado small businesses are being hit with unemployment-insurance rate hikes that sometimes quadruple their quarterly payments, according to Steve Raabe, writing today in the Denver Post. "Our hands effectively are tied," Don Mares told Raabe.

Mares is executive director of the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment, the agency notifying business owners of the higher insurance premiums. He has called together a task force to suggest reforms for the Colorado Unemployment Insurance Trust Fund, according to Raabe's story. The fund is the state's pool of money to pay unemployment-benefit checks. Colorado is already on the hook to the federal government for $368.5 million borrowed this year to pay benefits.

One of the members of that task force should be Gov.-elect John Hickenlooper's new director of the state's Office of Economic Development and International Trade, if Hickenlooper decides to appoint a new one.

Hickenlooper's transition team will begin rolling out a shape for his new administration about mid-month, spokesman Eric Brown said this week. What shape that takes around economic development is probably the top concern of the Colorado business community.

I once had hoped to join Gov. Bill Ritter's economic-development team. I can't say I'm glad I did not, but the four years I've had to think about it certainly fed my fantasies about what an effective economic-development team should be doing:

Like finding a way -- and the money -- for the state and its local governments to offer incentives to businesses to locate here. Big business fosters the growth of small businesses in a regional economy, and small businesses provide any economy the most jobs.

Or like being an advocate for the nearly 500,000 small businesses in the state, including more than 350,000 sole proprietors if they have survived the last two years of national recession.

Or like promoting the use of instate small-business vendors to do much of the work the state contracts out to private business. That work in the past has been valued at  more than $4 billion annually. So there's a lot of job creation built into that money.

Or like advocating the growth of women-owned and minority-owned businesses in order to correct a lopsided disparity of such firms among the state's contractor corps. Facilitating the use of such firms by large businesses in Colorado as well as by state and local government units would help strengthen the state's economy at the core of its small-business community.

Or like acting as a mediator for small businesses among state agencies like the labor department when decisions are made that affect a small-business owner's livelihood. The OEDIT director or his representative could ensure that small-business owners are given some consideration prior to boosting fees and raising premiums.

Or like advocating for the general business position among state agencies, boards and commissions when other special interests like labor unions and environmentalists try to influence regulatory decisions.

Last summer, the Denver Post published a story that suggested economic-development efforts in Colorado needed an overhaul.  Over the last four years, the state's economic-development office has seemed almost dormant. And advocating for anything through a state agency is often viewed in Colorado as some sort of blasphemy.

But the time is right for allowing such intra-government lobbying. Ritter got in trouble with the state's business community almost as quickly as he took office, and then spent the rest of his four years trying to make up for it -- only to offend the labor community as he did so.

Today's Post also carried an item that said Pamela Reichert, director of the trade office within OEDIT, was taking a position with the Metro Denver Economic Development Corp., signalling the exodus of state officials that usually follows a change of administration. Hickenlooper would be wise to consider some holdovers, but not necessarily in the OEDIT. 

Appointments in that office will signal to the business community what kind of governor the people of Colorado traded for Ritter. Business friendly but also a friend to working men and women? Over the past four years those two positions were made to look antithetical. They are not.

All the people of Colorado ought to benefit from electing a new governor.  

Be thankful for advertising

Remember Black Friday 2010. It marks the beginning of the nation's recovery from the Great Recession of 2008-2010.

The mighty American consumer, taught the harsh lesson of credit-card debt, is back in the market, but this time buying with cash in the bank.

Online shoppers boosted online retailers' revenue by 16 percent on the Friday after Thanksgiving, according to the Associated Press, while long lines in the dark hours before dawn Friday proved before doors even opened that brick-and-mortar shops were going to have a good day.

Locally, you could tell that advertisers were back in force in the Denver Post.The Post has been selling the bottom of its Sunday front page for more than a year now, it seems. Since summer, the newspaper has sold the top-right corner of the page, labeled "Today's Daily Deal," to a variety of advertisers. And now the newspaper is selling off the bottom of page 2 as well, depriving readers of the interesting short items it has regularly showcased in that space but driving up ad-sales revenue that much more.

After all, what's a newspaper for? To share the news and serve the public interest? Not necessarily.

Newspapers survive today by selling space to advertisers; and the Great Recession for Newspapers, which began even before the nation's latest financial crisis, has proved unarguably that business survival is the ultimate goal of any newspaper, just as it is for any business.

In fact, newspapers, today, are not much different from any retailer; the ad sale is king, and not much will get in its way. Walmart, for example, long prided itself on not having to advertise in media because its low prices would lead consumers to its aisles simply by word-of-mouth. Today, however, Walmart is inserting ads in the Post like any other big-box seller.

I no longer argue with newspapers on that score. My profession as a journalist is dependent on the ad sale, and plenty of jobs collapsed when advertisers moved from newspapers to other venues to deliver their messages.

And if Today's Daily Deal for pole-dancing lessons, symphony performances and home-security packages do the trick (pun intended), then I'm all for using the deals to give working journalists some white space to fill with news.

And you can't argue with the results. If ads spur consumer spending, and consumer spending creates jobs and jobs create more spending, then an economy that is sputtering back to life is what every American, even the underemployed and unemployed, can genuinely be thankful for on this holiday weekend.

I am.

Health reform taking root

Forget repeal. Health reform is taking root in Colorado and forcing doctors and insurers to face the facts of their new existence. 

Take, for example, the complaint of nurse practitioner Mary Lou Hendrix in yesterday's Denver Post. In a story by Nancy Lofholm, Hendrix described the difficulties she has encountered trying to be "credentialed" by health insurers whose pregnant customers want to use Hendrix's skills without her being supervised by a doctor.

"Credentialed" means the insurer agrees to pay Hendrix for her services when their customers make a claim through her for payment. According to Lofholm, a 2008 state law allows Hendrix to operate without supervision, at the same rates as physicians. After working for doctors for years,  Hendrix opened her own practice last spring.

In late September, Gov. Bill Ritter officially notified Medicare that Colorado is opting out of a federal rule that nurse anesthetists also must be supervised by a doctor, a full-fledged anesthesiologist. The next day, the Colorado Society of Anesthesiologists and the Colorado Medical Society, representing doctors, sued the state to block Ritter's decision. The lawsuit is pending.

Both developments reflect progress and resistance toward enactment of health reform meant to improve the lives of Coloradans. Nurse practitioners and nurse anesthetists can make competent health care available to more people across the state, expanding the market for their services and providing a measure of competition to doctors. Perhaps even driving down some prices.

For nurse anesthetists, the argument for their not needing a doctor's supervision is more than two decades old. I dated a nurse anesthetist in Texas, before coming to Colorado, who had to leave Austin for Idaho in order to practice her skill in a market unfettered by rules protecting the livelihood and wealth of doctors.

But when Ritter opted Colorado out of the Medicare rule this year, only 15 other states had done the same, showing how long it takes some reforms to take root. Hendrix's continuing problems with insurers illustrates the same slow creep of progress.

Following Ritter's decision and the filing of the lawsuit, the Colorado Society of Anesthesiologists posted on its website a call for members to register their displeasure with Ritter by calling or e-mailing his office. Lorez Meinhold said the office has received one complaint since the Sept. 28 announcement; that e-mail came in on Nov. 1. 

Health care in these United States can hardly be called a revolution, despite the Tea Party's Revolutionary War custumes during the last election campaign. Evolution occurs with each dying dinosaur's extinction. One day in Colorado, the evolution of a 21st century health-care system will be complete.

In the Chemo Room: I'm back ... !

Yes, I'm back in the Chemo Room, just as my oncologist suspected I would be, and I had hoped I would not.

But the only way to keep cancer from killing you is to keep fighting it.

So I am back in the Chemo Room fighting my cancer with the same two chemicals that got a "profound"  response from my body during my last round of chemo: Erbitux, that expensive cell-starving biologic, and Ironotecan, a cell-killing juice you really don't want to try.

My latest treatment was last week on Thursday, and I spent most of Friday and part of Saturday and Sunday trying to get over the hump of it. Sunday's Broncos' thumping of Kansas City helped.

I feel better now, so I'm back at my computer to tell you again about where I've been in my fight against this disease.

Before the latest treatment, I was telling people I felt I had come back to nearly 100 percent of my work energy before ever being diagnosed. That was the result of a seven-month break from the chemicals: my hair grew back; the neuropathy in my hands, feet and legs continued to dissipate, making me feel like my nerves were growing back; I was writing and posting these blogs (about other subjects) more frequently, writing on http://www.examiner.com/ about Colorado poetry more often, finishing my book about Denver oil man Timothy Marquez, and even writing about other literary topics on my poetry website, http://www.robertschwabpoet.com/.

I also underwent six weeks of radiation therapy trying to kill the one cancer-cell production center -- a lymph gland in my chest -- spotted in the March 17, 2010 pet scan I received following the end of the first Erbitux round of chemo.

The side effects of that treatment were minimal except for the fact that Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield initially denied paying for the treatment and sent me a statement indicating a debt of more than $70,000. I believe that claim is now being worked out. When you don't make much money, you have to treat such claims casually and just seek to have them resolved between your doctors, the hospital and your insurer.

Five-year survival rates for colo-rectal cancer starting with a tumor in the rectum are about 59 percent, according to a 2006 post on About.com.

My doctor, Thomas Kenney, believes my cancer had already metastasized to my lung before the September 2007 surgery to remove my tumor, so my odds of living with the disease for five years probably have been considerably lower, but my luck on the Erbitux and Irinotecan gives me a chance to boost my odds of survival even past the five-year mark.

I was taking flax-seed oil during the whole last round, and I believe (with no proof) it might have helped me, too, since long-ago research that was ignored by the medical community claimed flax oil acted as an anti-cancer agent. The latest anti-cancer agent to acquire blooming Internet demand is something called Lypo-Spheric Vicamin C, but you won't find many doctors swearing by it (again no proof).

My docs don't like me taking extra Vitamin C because they claim it interferes with the chemo. Kenney has told me to investigate my own alternative treatments to the cancer, and during the seven months I have been off his chemicals I have found that diet is probably the most logical alternative or supplemental treatment besides flax that I might undetake.

That's a difficult choice. You pretty much have to stop eating red meat, and if you don't eat vegetables raw, you should cook them from a raw state to have the most impact. The idea is the foods naturally boost your immune system, and your immune system is the best cancer-fighting agent there is. Chemo essentially destroys your immune system.

But with a new Whole Foods store and a Vitamin Cottage nearby, I might just give the food route a try. Many of you who know me well, know that I have never lost my appetite during this fight. Not for the fight, nor for a good dinner, cocktail and dessert on most evenings.