by John R. Luoma

With a single, concerted initiative, says Lakshman Guruswami, the world could save millions of people in poor nations from respiratory ailments and early death, while dealing a big blow to global warming — and all at a surprisingly small cost.

“If we could supply cheap, clean-burning cook stoves to the large portion of the world that burns biomass,” says Guruswami, a Sri Lankan-born professor of international law at the University of Colorado, “we could address a significant international public health problem, and at the same stroke cut a major source of warming.”

Sooty, indoor air pollution from open wood or other biomass fires has long been linked to health problems and deaths. More recently, scientists have been surprised to learn that black carbon — not only from biomass fires but from dirty diesel engines and other sources — is a far larger contributor to global warming than previously suspected: The dark particles absorb and retain heat close to the Earth’s surface that might otherwise be reflected.

Some two billion people around the world, Guruswami notes, do most or all of their cooking and heating with fires from simple biomass — dried dung, wood, brush, or crop residues. In India alone, the ratio is much higher — about three-fourths.

“Think about that,” says Guruswami, who directs his university’s Center for Energy and Environmental Security. “Two billion people, one-third of the people on Earth, are caught in a time warp, with no access to modern energy. They got energy from Prometheus a long time ago, and that was it.”

Public health scientists have been pointing out for years that open fires and primitive stoves for cooking and heating used in much of the developing world pose profound health risks, particularly among women and children. Women typically spend hours cooking multiple meals beside smoky fires and stoves, with infants and small children in close proximity.

The public health implications alone are profound: 1.5 million lives are lost to respiratory, heart and other soot-related harm every year, according to World Health Organization estimates.

As for the climate aspects, atmospheric scientists have more recently reported that ordinary soot — or black carbon — plays a surprisingly large role in global and regional warming. Some scientists now estimate that small, solid particles of black carbon are responsible for about one-fifth of warming globally and, as such, are the second-largest contributor to climate change, after carbon dioxide gas.

In addition to soaking up heat in the atmosphere, the tiny, dark particles — or aerosols — are blown poleward or up mountains, where they settle on snow and ice and absorb warmth. Although dirty diesel engines, power plants and other more advanced technologies produce black carbon, cooking fires appear to be the largest source of soot in developing nations.

More alarming, extra warming driven by black carbon appears to be especially amplified in the high country of Asia’s Tibetan Plateau, home to the world’s highest mountains. There, in a region sometimes called the “Third Pole,” summer melt-water from thousands of glaciers forms the headwaters of major rivers that provide water to more than a billion people in teeming cities and small farms below, in India, China, and smaller nations like Burma and Vietnam. In fact, the plateau has been called “Asia’s water tower,” feeding the Ganges, the Indus, the Brahmaputra, the Mekong, the Yangtze, and the Yellow rivers.

Already, glaciers on the plateau have declined by about 20 percent since the 1960s. Scientists have predicted that with rising Asian populations and more open fires, diesel engines, and burning of forests, the glacial melt will accelerate, eventually diminishing the rivers below.

Beginning in 2007, scientists at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography helped establish just how profound warming boosted by black carbon might be in the Tibetan Plateau. While previous hints had come from computer models, Scripps scientists working in India measured soot levels and dispersion by flying three unmanned aircraft equipped with sensors across the region. Using this data, the Scripps team, headed by climatologist Veerabhadran Ramanathan, concluded that black carbon was probably contributing at least as much to the Tibetan Plateau’s glacial melt as were greenhouse gases. A separate study last month estimated that black carbon was responsible for at least 30 percent of glacial melt in the Himalayas.

Late last year, NASA reported that black carbon rises into the atmosphere, attaches to dust, and moves with warm-season air patterns to the Himalayan foothills. Heat from the sun warms this “brown cloud,” accelerating its typical monsoon season rise up the slope, essentially pumping heat up the mountains, according to William Lau, who heads research in atmospheric sciences at NASA’S Goddard Space Flight Center.

“Over areas of the Himalayas, the rate of warming is more than five times faster than warming globally,“ Lau said at a press briefing in December, noting that the heating problem is most dramatic in the western part of the Tibetan Plateau. “Based on the differences, it’s not difficult to conclude that greenhouse gases are not the sole agents of change in [this] region,” he added. “There’s a localized phenomenon at play.”

Enter the cook stove. A November 2009 study published in The Lancet, the British medical journal, estimated that a decade-long, all-out effort to equip about 90 percent of Indian households that burn biomass with clean-burning cook stoves by 2020 would reduce premature deaths by 17 percent annually, essentially saving 55.5 million years of human life.

But there’s a key reason the world’s poor have long cooked with biomass over sooty fires, often nothing more than a “three-stone fire” with dried dung or brush smoldering under a pot sitting on a triangle of stones: They couldn’t afford anything better.

The University of Colorado’s Guruswami says that to be workable for billions of people who might live on as little as one dollar a day, a better cook stove has to have three main attributes: It has to reduce soot, it has to be long-lived, and it has to be cheap — ideally $10 or less. The good news is that inventors and engineers have come up with various versions of efficient cook stoves, some of them both simple to use and inexpensive.

In the early 1980s, Oregon-based engineer Larry Winiarski developed what he called the Rocket Stove, designed for cleaner combustion and more heat using a fire that burns the tips of a long bunch of small wood sticks: To feed the fire as the tips burn away, a cook need only push the bundle in further. The Rocket stove is designed to take advantage of natural convection to burn its biomass more efficiently, and in fact uses about half as much wood as a primitive three-stone fire or simpler stove.

The Aprovecho Research Center, a nonprofit where Winiarski serves as technical director, estimates that more than 40 stove projects in many nations have since built Rocket stoves, and estimates that more than a quarter-million Rocket stoves are now being used worldwide.

Fort Collins, Colo., home to a major university-based combustion laboratory, is a hotbed of cook-stove advocacy and dissemination.

Envirofit, a nonprofit started by two engineering graduates of Colorado State University and two professors, has developed a modified, patent-pending Rocket stove that it claims is exceptionally durable. A problem with past designs is that metal combustion chambers tend to quickly fail due to high heat and caustic fumes. But Envirofit worked with Oak Ridge National Laboratory scientists to develop a combustion chamber made of metal alloys that give it an exceptionally long life — long enough, it says, that it can issue warranties on the chamber for five years.

The group works closely with Colorado State’s world-class Engines and Energy Conversion Lab to develop other combustion-chamber and stove efficiency features. The engineering focus, says Envirofit Vice President of Engineering Nathan Lorenz, has been to “control the geometry of the combustion chambers and heat transfer.” The more heat you transfer, the faster a pot heats up, the less fuel you burn.

About 100,000 Envirofit stoves have already been sold in India, at prices as low as 700 rupees, or about $15. The stoves quickly pay for themselves in fuel savings alone, allowing households to save $50 to $75 annually that would have been spent on wood or other biomass, even while using 60 percent less biomass and eliminating about 80 percent of soot.

Another Fort Collins-based nonprofit, called Trees, Water, and People, focuses on Central America, Mexico, and Haiti, where it promotes local construction of Rocket-type stoves. Working with local partners, the group says it has built more than 35,000 stoves.

In India, Scripp’s V. Ramanathan has helped pioneer a newer program that adds a layer of science. Dubbed Project Surya, this nascent effort is conducted in partnership with the United Nations Environment Programme. Its first community-wide experiment, launched last March in a village in Uttar Pradesh state, will provide cook stoves, along with solar lanterns (to replace sooty kerosene lamps), to every household that wants them.

The unique feature: The project is designed to collect a wealth of data. A small sensor on the roof of the home of the village leader will provide the first accurate measurements of how much carbon is actually reduced in the local setting. Regional sensors and satellites will eventually help scientists learn more about more widespread pollution effects.

The Energy and Resources Institute in India also has launched a “Lighting a Billion Lives” campaign designed to replace soot-producing kerosene lamps and dung or wood fires with solar-powered lanterns. Begun in 2008, the campaign has so far supplied more than 6,000 solar lanterns to people in roughly 200 Indian villages.

Elsewhere, two of Europe’s largest industrial corporations, Phillips and Bosch, also have high-efficiency cook stoves in development. At Yale University, mechanical engineer Allesandro Gomez, director of the school’s Center for Combustion Studies, has begun to work on other designs.

But a conundrum remains. Researchers have found that it can be difficult to convince people to switch from traditional cooking methods to more advanced stoves, for a variety of reasons that range from uneasiness with unfamiliar or finicky technology, to upfront costs. Working with Yale development economist Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak and a local NGO, a team of researchers at Stanford University has found that many households in Bangladesh simply do not regard the high-efficiency cook stoves as great improvements. The group found that even when offered completely free stoves, more than 30 percent of households refused the offer.

Envirofit’s Lorenz says some of those stoves are simply too cheaply made. That’s why his nonprofit focuses on charging at least minimally for its more durable products, and even paying attention to product aesthetics. “People would rather be treated like customers than victims,” he says.

In India, the promise of improved cook stoves and reduced black carbon have triggered high-level government action recently. In December, New and Renewable Energy Minister Farooq Abdullah announced a new “National Biomass Cook-stoves Initiative.” Given that the world’s wealthiest nations are overwhelmingly responsible for planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions, it seems reasonable to suggest that these countries could launch micro-lending programs to underwrite the widespread adoption of clean stoves.

India and the world have at least one good reason to move quickly to reduce black carbon: Compared to greenhouse gas reductions, slashing black carbon offers a much quicker and cheaper fix. While climate-altering carbon dioxide can remain in the atmosphere for many decades, solid soot generally falls from the sky in days or weeks.

“It’s a faster fix, and when you think about the humongous cost of fixing even one power plant to reduce carbon dioxide, it’s really cheap,” says Guruswami. “This is what economists like to call low-lying fruit. Let’s find a way pick it.”

Reprinted with permission from Yale Environment 360

by Stephen Lacey, Staff Writer

Last summer, clean energy advocates were confident that the U.S. Congress would pass a comprehensive energy and climate bill by the time the Copenhagen conference rolled around. Now, as energy issues slip further down the policy priority list in the wake of that failed meeting, advocates are left wondering if the U.S. will see any significant piece of clean energy legislation in 2010.

With health care, the economy and the upcoming mid-term elections dominating the political agenda in Washington, most onlookers now believe that an energy bill will be broken up into smaller pieces in order to make progress on key issues this year.

“It looks less and less likely that Congress will pass a broad climate bill. Lawmakers are now talking about individual bills focused just on one issue,” says Chris Stimpson, Executive Campaigner for Solar Nation, a grassroots lobbying organization run by the American Solar Energy Society.

Much has changed since the beginning of 2009, when the clean energy community was banking on President Obama's election promises to swiftly pass a climate bill that would put a price on carbon and create strong national targets for renewable energy.

The prospects for such a program looked good last July when the Waxman-Markey bill passed the House of Representatives. That piece of legislation created a cap and trade program, a 20 percent renewable energy target by 2020, a program to upgrade the electric grid and stronger energy efficiency standards. Although the cap and trade portion was criticized by some as being too lenient on polluters, the bill was a major step for renewables: It would have finally provided the national target that the industry has been seeking for years.

But then the climate bill quickly stalled in the Senate, where lawmakers have been sidetracked by the contentious health care debate. A number of politicians, including Democratic Senators John Kerry and Barbara Boxer, have introduced their own pieces of legislation; however, it is unlikely that the Senate will vote on either bill until March of this year. House lawmakers are now urging Senators to act soon, as the bills will expire at the end of this year when the Congressional session ends.

Because this is a Congressional election year, the make-up of the House and Senate may be different when the new session begins. That could mean that Democrats — who have been much more supportive of climate and clean energy legislation — will have less power to pass a strong bill next year. And if members of Congress are worrying about getting re-elected, they may not give as much attention to climate and energy issues this year.

“[Congress] may not have the energy, ironically enough, to work on an energy bill,” says Stimpson. “If it doesn't happen by Memorial day, this being an election year, it's generally understood here [in Washington] that you can forget it — nothing else will happen until after the election.”

The chance that individual, renewable-energy specific programs will get passed is much more realistic, says Stimpson. Some analysts believe that Congress will individually support more manufacturing tax credits for renewable energy companies, a renewable energy standard and increased funding for an overhaul of the electric grid, rather than an overarching climate bill.

Many advocates who see renewables as only one part of a broader carbon-reduction strategy are disappointed by this approach. Assuming the political landscape in Washington will be different in the next session of Congress, they see 2010 as a “make-or-break” year for climate change legislation.

“To say that we'll pass some parts this year and save other parts for other years, I think risks dealing with the bargaining in Congress that needs to take place,” says Jim Rubens with the advocacy group Clean Energy Works. “If we can't get them in this year, they're just going to be tougher to get later.”

To make matters more complicated, there is increasing backlash in Washington against an economy-wide cap and trade program. Many Senators have proposed more straightforward carbon taxes or “cap and dividend” programs, which would tax carbon at the source and then send the money back to taxpayers in different ways.

Most observers believe that cap and trade will be the policy of choice, but they agree that the debate could be delayed further as concerns over a complex trading program are worked out.

“I do believe [cap and trade] is on the train right now. But I do think there's going to be lots of compromise and lots of horse trading. And you never know what's going to end up in the sausage until the votes are taken,” says Analyst Scott Sklar, president of the Washington, DC-based consulting firm Stella Group Ltd.

In the meantime, the Environmental Protection Agency is gearing up to start regulating greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. This top-down “command and control” approach, which is much less flexible than a trading program, has many in the energy business worried. The Obama administration is using this option as a way to get Congress moving on a climate bill this year. It doesn't appear to be working, however.

Even though the passage of a comprehensive climate bill is becoming less likely each day, analysts are still positive about the prospects for renewables in 2010. After all, the Obama administration has given more support for clean energy in the last year than had been given in the last decade, says Sklar.

Sklar points to last year's stimulus package, increased government spending on R&D and the billions of private dollars that have poured into the industry as tell-tale signs of how strong the industry is today — even if Congress doesn't pass a bill that advocates were hoping for.

“Sometimes you have to separate the climate issues and the renewables issues...They are both extremely important...but I sometimes have to pinch myself when I see where [the renewable energy industry] has come. It's on a trajectory that I don't think can be stopped.”

Reprinted with permission from Renewable Energy World

Developed nations rounded up additional pledges for adaptation and mitigation funding in Copenhagen on Wednesday, and on Thursday developing nations won a procedural battle that has slowed negotiations over the past week and a half.

Japan stepped up with a large commitment to add about $19.5 billion to short-term funding for developing nations for the years 2010-2012, according to an AFP report. Along with previous commitments of $10.6 billion by the European Union, this is enough to fund the $10 billion a year proposed for this time period.

The U.S. has yet to commit to commit to specific funding amounts.

Thursday morning, Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen, who is presiding over the remainder of the conference, said he would abandon an attempt to combine various negotiating texts into a single document for review by heads of state in the final hours. (Reuters reporting)

Developing nations have repeatedly protested against the creation of such a text, arguing that it benefits industrialized nations and their desire to create a single unifying agreement to replace Kyoto Protocol.

Delegates agreed to split talks into two tracks--one looking at further commitments by developed nations except the United States to cut emissions until 2020 and another looking at ways to get all nations to slow climate change.

UN Climate Secretary Yvo De Boer on Wednesday asked the U.S. to make a specific proposal on climate financing to developing countries, according to the Xinhua News Agency. He noted that the US is in a difficult position, not having taken steps to slow emissions under the Kyoto Protocol. He also said he believes China's offer to reduce the intensity of its greenhouse gas emissions 40-45% by 2020 is "very encouraging."

US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton arrived on Thursdsay and said the US is willing to participate in a $100-billion-a-year fund through the year 2020, but that China must be willing to allow for verification of its emissions reduction efforts.

Although Clinton did not give a specific US contribution figure, the commitment was considered a breakthrough, leading de Boer to say: "“Hold tight. Mind the doors. The cable car is moving again.”

Clinton said the money would be a mix of public and private funds, including “alternative sources of finance.” Typically in multilateral financial efforts the United States contributes about 20% according to the New York Times.

Reuters on Wednesday quoted an unnamed Western negotiator who said China told participants it saw no possibility of achieving a detailed accord to tackle global warming. But on Thursday, China refuted the story as a rumor meant to lay blame on China, should negotiations fail.

China's climate change ambassador Yu Qingtai said "Copenhagen is too important to fail." He said the Chinese delegation "came to Copenhagen with hope and have not given it up." (Reuters reporting)

China has softened its stance against mandatory verification of its promised emissions reductions, according to a separate Reuters story. The country's head negotiator Su Wei said "national communications" on emissions as outlined by the Kyoto Protocol would be sufficient.

"It will not be difficult for us to find a solution to this problem (verification), as long as we adhere to the principles of the convention, it is not a crucial problem," he said.

Another hopeful sign that developing and developed nations may be moving closer on their demands is that Africa reportedly scaled back its expectations for climate aid on Wednesday, according to a report on MSNBC.com. The report did not state by how much, but African nations had previously asked for $40 billion a year in the mid-term.

The US on Wednesday pledged $1 billion to the reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation (REDD) program, bringing total funding for the period 2010-2012 to $3.5 billion.

The New York Times report did not give any details as to the current form of the program. Environmentalists earlier in the week said it had been stripped of important targets and safeguards.

Republican Senator and climate change denier James Inhofe (R-Okla.) made an unwelcomed press appearance Thursday morning, after failing to receive an invite to talk within the conference.

“I am here to make sure the 190 countries here don’t go home with the false impression,” he told a somewhat hostile crowd. “The United States is not going to pass cap and trade. It just isn’t going to happen. Its chances are zero.”

Fox News reported that "Inhofe often looked like a lamb on his way to slaughter."

Obama arrives in Copenhagen Friday morning. Obama is unlikely to propose a more aggressive emissions reduction target, according to Reuters.

However, he may have wiggle room to raise his pledge from 17% below 2005 levels to 20%--the level proposed in a current US Senate bill.

Combined with specific, big numbers to support Clinton's $100 billion proposal, Obama could prompt agreement to a specific, but non-binding framework on Friday. However, that would likely require other developed nations to push to higher levels for emissions reductions--a brave step in light of US history on Kyoto and the Obama Administration's inability to guarantee cooperation of the US Congress.

Scientists and non-governmental organizations at the United Nations climate negotiations last week said the commonly accepted figures for greenhouse gas emssions from tropical deforestation are too high.

In light of a new analysis published earlier this week in Nature Geoscience, a group including experts on deforestation emissions, released the following statement:

"The new paper, other papers and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports published in the last few years lead us to conclude that the percentage of global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from deforestation and forest degradation is less than the commonly used figure of 'about 20%.' The best current estimate would be about 15% if peat degradation is included."

The change in the estimate is due to several factors, including increases in fossil fuel emissions, as well as revision of the estimates of deforestation emissions, due to new data and scientific analyses.

The change is not due to a decrease in deforestation since the 1990s, and in fact the analyses agree that global deforestation in the early 2000s has been similar to that in the 1990s. So, this new estimate is not a sign of progress.

This figure includes deforestation, forest degradation, and peat emissions from deforestation and degradation (including later decomposition and fires in peat from previously deforested areas).

Even considering the lower figure, these emissions are comparable to the emissions of all of the European Union, and are greater than those of all cars, trucks, planes, ships and trains worldwide.

Reducing tropical forest emissions remains a relatively cost-effective option to reduce emissions, the Union of Concerned Scientists said in a release, highlighting some lines from the new paper:

"…reducing fossil fuel emissions remains the key element for stabilizing atmospheric CO2 concentrations. Nevertheless, efforts to mitigate emissions from tropical forests and peatlands, and maintain existing terrestrial carbon stocks, remain critical…."

Some of the scientists and organizations endorsing the statement include: Environmental Defense Fund, Natural Resources Defense Council, Rainforest Action Network, Sierra Club, The Nature Conservancy, Frédéric Achard (Joint Research Centre of the European Commission), Ruth DeFries (Columbia University) and Douglas Morton (NASA).

Reprinted with permission from SustainableBusiness.com">Sustinable buseinss

By Michael Ricciardi

Climate change isn’t just warming the atmosphere, it’s also warming the ocean’s surface and deeper levels of the water column. This is known as the pelagic ocean (the “pelagic zone” is any part of the water column other than that at the sea floor) and it just so happens to harbor the most productive ecosystem on planet Earth. The pelagic ocean is responsible for an estimated half of the world’s primary production (i.e., the basic food or nutrient making needed to sustain other life), and sustains most of the world’s natural fisheries.

The pelagic zone also plays a very complex but important role in the global carbon cycle. Inorganic carbon (mostly in the form of CO2) can be “drawn down” from the atmosphere by two main processes: the respiration of photo-synthetic algae and plankton (which produce oxygen and serve as a food source as well), and, secondly, the sedimentation of carbon (in the form of sinking, dead marine matter) onto the sea floor. Most algae and phytoplankton have chlorophyll and live in the upper most layer of the water column where there is sufficient sunlight penetration (this is called the euphotic zone; from the surface down to 200 meters is the epipelagic zone). Although carbon is also removed via “outgassing” (the exporting of carbon and carbon-based molecules into the atmosphere via ocean-air circulation), these two processes keep carbon out of the atmosphere. And of the two, bottom accumulation (via sinking) is the predominant means by which carbon is removed from the water column.

This absorption of carbon and its eventual sinking to and accumulating on the sea bottom (also described as “vertical exporting”) is known generally as the “carbon pump”, and is perhaps the single most important engine of global carbon cycling.

CO2 build up in the atmosphere tends to increase warming in the biosphere and atmosphere, and, in also contributing to warming of the sea surface, some of this heat is circulated by wave action and absorbed, making its way down to greater depths. This impacts marine creatures, large and small, with consequences for long-term carbon cycling stability (this is in addition to acidification due to CO2 combining with hydrogen ions in water to form carbonic acid).

Over the past several years, climatologists and oceanographers have been accumulating sufficient evidence to assert that both sea-surface and pelagic ocean temperatures are increasing. The scientists showed that the numerous marine creatures that inhabit this zone respond variably to temperature increases, but the primary focus of a recent study (Wohlers et al, Changes in biogenic carbon flow in response to sea surface warming,) was the role of phytoplanktons (such as diatoms) in the “draw down” of inorganic carbon.

Using an indoor mesocosm model (a scaled up, enclosed model of planktonic habitat) to cause algal blooms, the scientists showed that rising temperatures increase the respiration of organic carbon (carbon composing or coming from living tissue). They also showed that a temperature increase from 2° to 6° C. causes a decrease in the biological draw down of inorganic carbon (such as by plants during photosynthesis) by up to 31%. Further, the loss of organic carbon through sinking (a major part of that carbon “pump”) was significantly reduced. Ocean-air mixing, the absorption of CO2 through phytoplankton respiration, and the eventual sinking (or vertical exporting) of carbon are all crucial for keeping CO2 build up in the atmosphere in check

Marines fauna sensitivity to warming is highly variable. Some creatures in the ocean (such as the light-harvesting planktons and cyanobacteria), generate their own nutrients (autotrophs), while other organisms (like dinoflagellates, generally zooplankton) are able to generate some of their nutrient needs (heterotrophs), but also depend on other organisms (like sugar-producing planktons) to provide some of these. The scientists expect that this variance in sensitivity to increasing temperatures will “cause major shifts” in the carbon and energy flow (including the Nitrogen cycle) of the pelagic system.

Warmer oceans mean less dissolved oxygen (O2, what most, non-planktonic marine creatures require for normal respiration) which means that larger creatures like fish will have less O2 (and may shift to breathing less efficient CO2) and less energy to pursue smaller fish to eat, and possibly, reproduce less, further contributing to the decline in carbon sequestering via dead fish sinking to the bottom. This outcome illustrates the general findings that show increasing temperatures leading to both an increase in organic carbon respiration and decreased sedimentation.

The researchers further warn that increasing temperatures in this vital, globally-extended ecosystem could “reduce the transfer of primary produced organic matter to higher trophic levels” (e.g., such as those that sustain corals and the many species that use them as habitat), interfere with the global carbon pump, and possibly set up a positive feedback mechanism, further increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Reprinted with permission from EcoWorldly.com

Now that President Obama is done with addressing the throngs and bow ties and balls for a while, and that his administration has been sworn in, it's time to get down to (green) business.

It was an intense extended weekend leading up to the inauguration, as shown in this series of videos produced by Blue Water Entertainment's Greg Reitman and Chip Comins of the American Renewable Energy Day. The videos (see more here) highlight the inauguration, Martin Luther King day on the D.C. Mall, a private party with celebrities for Barack Obama, and a green inaugural ball.

So how will the new government impact renewable energy and sustainable initiatives in the public and private sectors? Will there be Oba-momentum in clean tech financing, stocks, and projects?

One thing is for sure, we need more energy, so it makes sense for green energy to be seriously considered in any place wherever additional power generation is demanded. According to data released by the Energy Information Administration Wednesday, generation of electric power grew 2.3 percent in 2007, while retail demand grew by 2.6 percent. Wind power surpassed hydro as the leading renewable energy source during the year. When the 2008 data is released in a year it may show less growth because of the factories shuttered in Q4, but when the economy comes back (hopefully later in 2009), so will a surge in power demand. The solar industry will be a growing part of the energy equation, but not as much as was hoped before the economic downturn, according to Sustainable Industries.

Triple Pundit says an "Obama Bounce" is likely for clean tech stocks. The stock market rebounded on Wednesday after a dismal inauguration day plunge.

New Department of Agriculture secretary Tom Vilsack says the administration is committed to incorporating renewable fuels into our energy mix and the "USDA will be partnering with a number of other agencies and departments in trying to find a focused, aggressive, comprehensive effort,” according to Domestic Fuel. Since the billions of barrels of oil we've imported is all money leaving our economy, the administration is justifying renewable fuels as an economic issue.

The Sustainable Energy Network, consisting of 600 organizations and individuals, sent the administration a laundry list of top-priority action items, as reported by Greenbang. One of the first things the EPA may do is to stop fighting with California over the authority to regulate carbon dioxide emissions from vehicles.

Talking straight about the immediate challenges and our hopeful future is important, but the administration's actions will speak much louder.