The cap and trade bill may be floundering about in the US amid great shoutings and special interest amendings re employment and jobs and the fate of a livable Earth. In the meantime, a finer-grained ferment of littler stories helps remind one that whatever the big shots are doing to show why they think they are in charge, a whole lot of local, regional, private, and other measures and prognostications are nudging us, if not into a fully ethical way of doing things, at least away from business as usual.
Sample Stories from the last week:
- Science News – Rachel Ehrenberg: THE BIOFUEL FUTURE ; Don’t despair, she says. We’re still in beta test. This is a good, heavily reported, and lengthy enterprise explainer, in plain English, longer on expertise than on facile style (one nat’l lab’s “effort to watch grass grow” is nifty phrasing).
- NYTimes – Kate Galbreath: Efficiency Drive Could Cut Energy Use 23% by 2020, Study Finds ; What could happen in the US. See Also an insightful blog: SF Chronicle – Cameron Scott;
- Reuters – Krittivas Mukherjee: India to enforce energy efficiency in climate fight ; But the enforcement, one is disappointed to learn, has to do with labels and customer choice, not so much with mandated performance.
- Telegraph – Dean Nelson (filing from New Delhi): India hopes to meets its energy gap by tapping the power of the sun ; But actually cut GHG emissions? Not in this decade or the next or maybe the next after that either.Various outlets: Nissan rolls out its electric car and it looks like a real car (as real as a Prius anyway). Reuters Nick Chambers ; Bloomberg Kyori Ueo, Tetsuya Komatsu ; Bloomberg (video) ; Autoweek J.P. Vettraino ;
- SF Chronicle – David R. Baker: Offshore windmills hold clean-energy promise ; Too bad to see the abused term “wind mill” when wind turbine or wind power is available. Baker’s story gets into the perils to sea birds, but not much, from possible floating, deep water installations far from shore. The story also has one of those increasingly common and inscrutable estimates on potential power from renewable and, for now, minor sources: that these things could, on a windy day, fill the state’s grid with lots of watts left over.
- ABC – Lee Dye: Turning Sunshine Into Megawatts . Noted Astronomer Roger Angel Turns His Attention to Earth ; Oldtimers’ alert – yes, the same Lee D. as once toiled at the LA Times. This is a fine profile of a famous scientist turning his off-Earth talents to practical employment on Earth, complete with more inscrutable estimates of ultimate potentials. Usage uh oh : one Holy Grail, coming up.
- Berkeley Daily Planet – Richard Benneman: BP’s Biofuel Lab Heads to Downtown Berkeley ; The Tracker’s local, struggling paper gets a nifty combo of big-picture stakes and small town politics murk. Here’s some UC Berkeley background on the project.
-CP
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