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Texas, headquarters of America's oil industry, is about to stake a fortune on wind power. In what experts say is the biggest investment in the clean and renewable energy in U.S. history, utility officials in the Lone Star State gave preliminary approval Thursday to a $4.9 billion plan to build new transmission lines to carry wind-generated electricity from gusty West Texas to urban areas like Dallas.

The row over US inaction on carbon emissions reached new heights yesterday after the White House allowed Congress to look at last year's government proposal to officially deem climate change a threat to public health - a plan that aides to George Bush refused to acknowledge or read. The climate plan was finished in December by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in response to a supreme court ruling that required the Bush administration to state whether carbon emissions should be regulated to protect public health.

After the logging days and before outsourcing and current fuel costs, several cities in the state of Michigan enjoyed a prosperous hay-day of industrial ingenuity.

Toxic waste still plagues American communities 27 years after the U.S. government set up a program to identify and clean up the country's worst sites. A one-year investigation by the Center for Public Integrity reveals the beleaguered state of the Environmental Protection Agency's Superfund effort, uncovers the companies and government agencies linked to the most sites and tracks progress of the clean up.

San Jose, California-based SunPower Corp. announced Thursday that it has clinched a deal with Florida Power and Light for the development of a 35 megawatt solar power system in Florida, the largest in the United States, according to reports. The project involves the construction of two solar power generation facilities, a 25 megawatt plant in DeSoto County in 2009, and a 10 megawatt plant at Kennedy Space Center in 2010.

Twenty-five years ago, when I was CEO of Intel, I had an unusual experience while visiting a customer. It was during a period of tight availability of microprocessors, our main product. This was not an unusual state of affairs. Supply and demand ebbed and flowed as the computer business had its ups and downs. Sometimes we had too many chips sitting in inventory; other times, like this one, we had too few. My main purpose in visiting was to reassure the customer that we were working hard to boost production and that relief was on the way.

Use the right energy for the right use. That concept lies at the core of a U.S. domestic energy plan unveiled Tuesday by legendary oilman T. Boone Pickens. The United States uses close to $700 billion in foreign energy supplies, primarily oil, Pickens pointed out on CNBC's "Squawk Box." It will be impossible for one energy source to totally replace that supply, he noted.

Despite an unstable regulatory environment-renewable energy tax incentives are stalled in the senate, BLM policy has been inconsistent- the United States will surpass Germany to be the largest market for solar power in the world by 2011, according to a report by JP Morgan, cited in Greentech Media. By 2011, the US will have an installed capacity of 1.6 gigawatts (with 920 MW in California alone), surpassing Germany's expected capacity of 1.35 gigawatts. The third largest market by this time will be South Korea with 957 megawatts of capacity.

There are times in the history of our nation when our very way of life depends upon dispelling illusions and awakening to the challenge of a present danger. In such moments, we are called upon to move quickly and boldly to shake off complacency, throw aside old habits and rise, clear-eyed and alert, to the necessity of big changes. Those who, for whatever reason, refuse to do their part must either be persuaded to join the effort or asked to step aside. This is such a moment. The survival of the United States of America as we know it is at risk. And even more - if more should be required - the future of human civilization is at stake.

An unusual combination of economic and environmental forces have created a "perfect storm" that could help geothermal shed its back-seat status to its renewable cousins wind and solar energy, experts said at an international conference. One after another, state and federal regulators, oil company executives, investor-owned utility officials and private developers on Monday recited the conditions in play to an overflow crowd of more than 1,000.

Congress' financial bailout included an increase and extension on tax credits for solar energy users, still mostly an option for the rich. Earlier this year, Vicki Eckels put a state-of-the-art solar power system on her house in Fort Lauderdale for $43,000. ''I feel good because I'm a clean energy producer.'' The federal government will reward her by knocking off $2,000 from her 2008 taxes. If she had waited until next year to install the system, her tax savings could have been $12,900, thanks to a provision hidden within the massive bailout Congress passed last week.

As utility costs mount ever higher, Americans now have real options to take home energy matters into their own hands with "green" systems that can pay for themselves in as little as a few years. Among the choices: wind, solar, geothermal and a "microhydro" option that is potentially cheaper than a year's tuition at many state colleges.

The United States Congress passed tax credits for wind, solar, biomass, and geothermal energy, worth $17 billion over eight years. The tax credit portion of the law beefs up and extends an expiring tax credit for renewable-energy projects. It extends a wind power credit for one year, extends geothermal and biomass energy credits for two years, and provides incentives to the solar industry - such as the removal of a $2,000 credit cap for residential solar installations - for eight years, until 2016.

A cheap new way to attach mirrors to silicon yields very efficient solar cells that don't cost much to manufacture. The technique could lead to solar panels that produce electricity for the average price of electricity in the United States.

The solar power installation at Applied Materials' headquarters is further evidence that companies looking to go green should think blacktop. The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based maker of gear for making high-tech products announced Friday that it has completed the installation a pair of solar power systems that together can produce 2.1 megawatts of energy--which qualifies it, the company says, as the "largest solar power deployment at a corporate facility in the United States."

Shai Agassi looks up and down the massive rectangular table in the Ritz-Carlton ballroom and begins to worry. He knows he's out of his league here. For the last day and a half, he's been listening to an elite corps of Israeli and US politicians, businesspeople, and intellectuals debate the state of the world. Agassi is just one of 60 sequestered in a Washington, DC, hotel for a conference run by the Saban Center for Middle East Policy. Among the participants: Bill Clinton, former Israeli prime minister Shimon Peres, Supreme Court justice Stephen Breyer, and two past directors of the CIA.

The Upper Great Plains Wind Energy Programmatic EIS Information Center Web site was launched September 11, 2008. This Web site is the online center for public information and involvement in the Upper Great Plains Wind Energy Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement. The U.S. Department of Energy, Western Area Power Administration (Western), and the U.S. Department of the Interior, Fish and Wildlife Service (Service), will prepare a Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (PEIS) to evaluate the impacts of wind energy development within Western's Upper Great Plains Customer Service Region (UGP Region), which encompasses all or parts of the States of Iowa, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota; and on the Service's landscape-level grassland and wetland easements in North Dakota, South Dakota, and eastern Montana.

Scientists at the Ohio State Institute for Materials Research recently announced that they have developed a new hyper-efficient solar material that is able to capture light from every spectrum of the rainbow. Whereas most photovoltaics are limited to collecting energy from a small range of frequencies, the new material is able to absorb energy from all spectrums of visible light at once. The breakthrough development heralds a new breed of extremely efficient solar panels on the horizon.

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Eastern Europeans and others seeking to use the current financial meltdown as an excuse to roll back climate commitment have failed (for now). The BBC reports: European Union leaders agreed to stick to their plan to cut greenhouse gases - despite a surprise demand by Poland and six other member states to drop them to ease the impact on industry struggling with the global credit crunch. Speaking at the end of a two-day summit, French President Nicolas Sarkozy said: "The deadline on climate change is so important that we cannot use the financial and economic crisis as a pretext for dropping it."