The Orange County Convention Center's massive rooftop will soon shoulder the largest solar project in the Southeast. County officials approved a $7.3 million plan Tuesday to blanket the roof of the nation's second-largest convention center with panels that can turn sunshine into energy, without producing pollution.

Hard times are looming. And in their desperation to keep the American economy afloat, government and business will be tossing overboard any proposals for real environmental protection. No time for such romantic foolishness when there are investments to be protected. Get those tax refunds back into retailers' registers, quick!

WASHINGTON - President Bush put politics ahead of the facts Tuesday as he sought to blame Congress for high energy prices, saying foreign suppliers are pumping just about all the oil they can and accusing lawmakers of blocking new refineries.

The American Petroleum Institute (API), the trade organization for the oil and natural gas industry, has just begun running a feel-good commercial that argues "America's future" lies in drilling out domestic reserves of oil and natural gas off our coasts, in our western lands, and in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Here's what the ad says:

An MIT class has estimated the carbon emissions of Americans in a wide variety of lifestyles -- from the homeless to multimillionaires, from Buddhist monks to soccer moms --

Spiegel Online published a series of pictures titled "Desertec: Strom aus der Wüste" (translation: Desertech: Electricity from the desert). It includes this image of how much land would be needed to power the world, Europe or Germany with solar-thermal power. The idea is similar to a post we did a year ago: How Much Land to Power The Whole World with Solar?

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia will not accept binding caps on its greenhouse gas emissions under a new climate regime, currently being negotiated to succeed the Kyoto Protocol after 2012, top officials said on Monday. Kyoto puts a cap on the average, annual greenhouse gas emissions from 2008-12 for some 37 industrialized countries, including Russia.

DOVER, Mass. - On a recent sunny afternoon Bob Loebelenz pauses to gaze 72 feet into the air at the spinning blades of his wind turbine, a small "clean, free electricity" smile creasing the corners of his mouth. While giant wind turbines that supply power to utilities sprout along ridgelines across the United States, far smaller residential wind generators, like the one Mr. Loebelenz erected in 2003 to power his suburban Boston home, are still unusual in densely populated places.

The future of the world's largest offshore wind farm and a symbol of Britain's renewable energy future was thrown into doubt last night after it emerged that Shell was backing out of the project and indicated it would prefer to invest in more lucrative oil schemes.

The sun blasts Earth with enough energy in one hour-4.3 x 1020 joules-to provide all of humanity's energy needs for a year (4.1 x 1020 joules), according to physicist Steven Chu, director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The question is how to most effectively harness it. Thin-film solar cells may be the answer: One recently converted 19.9 percent of the sunlight that hit it into electricity, surpassing the amount converted into power by mass-produced traditional silicon photovoltaics and offering the potential to unleash this renewable energy source.

Save Bookmark

Scientists have found new evidence that the Earth's natural feedback mechanism regulated carbon dioxide levels for hundreds of thousands of years. But they say humans are now emitting CO2 so fast that the planet's natural balancing mechanism cannot keep up.

BEIJING, April 28 -- CHINA is looking to expand wind power generating capacity to 100,000 megawatts by 2020, or fivefold the previous target, an industry official said. "The NDRC has just recently completed an internal meeting to discuss the possibility of increasing wind power capacity to 100,000MW," Shi Pengfei, vice president of Chinese Wind Energy Association said, referring to the National Development and Reform Commission, China's top industry planning body. "It's not 20,000MW or 30,000MW as previously targeted."

The challenges our society faces with depleted energy resources, water shortages, soaring food costs all point to environmental solutions.

OSLO (AFP) - Projects to reduce carbon dioxide emissions in developing countries have prevented 135 million tonnes of CO2 emissions from entering Earth's atmosphere so far, the Norwegian classification group Det Norske Veritas (DNV) said on Monday. The projects, known as Clean Development Mechanisms (CDMs) and defined in the Kyoto Protocol, allow industrialised countries and their companies to finance projects aimed at reducing greenhouse gases in developing countries.

From production to processing, transport to trash can, meals and snacks can leave a large environmental footprint. One company aims to slow this trend with a new low-carb menu. Carbs - as in carbon.

(NaturalNews) For decades, battery storage technology has been a heavy weight on the back of scientific innovation. From cell phones to electric vehicles, our technological capabilities always seem to be several steps ahead of our ability to power them. Several promising new technologies are currently under development to help power the 21st century, but one small start-up looks especially well positioned to transform the way we think about energy storage.

Last week saw the opening of the first hydrogen fuelling station in England. The station is based at Birmingham University, where experiments are being carried out to test the viability of hydrogen in transport applications, as part of Birmingham's 'Science City' hydrogen energy project.