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When Dow Chemical, reeling from high oil prices, called for tough fuel-economy standards, auto makers were livid — and Dow CEO Andrew Liveris backpedaled. So it goes in the sector-by-sector jousting over America’s voracious energy appetite.

A lot of politicians seem to love nuclear power—from John McCain to Angela Merkel and Silvio Berlusconi. But more importantly, public opinion everywhere is getting behind them.

File this one under if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. A group of commercial fishermen wants to get in on the rush to build offshore wind farms to generate electricity. It’s an interesting about face for the fishing industry, which has traditionally fought offshore industrialization – other than their own floating seafood factories, that is. The effort is attracting attention in New Jersey, where the state is looking to provide grants for a pilot offshore wind farm.

Bank of America says it has decided to start factoring a cost of carbon-dioxide emissions into its decisions about whether to underwrite debt for new coal-fired plants. Specifically, the bank says it anticipates a federal cap that would require a utility to pay between $20 and $40 for every ton of CO2 its power plants emit. Today in Europe, which already has imposed caps, a permit to emit a ton of CO2 is trading at about $29. Bank of America’s announcement comes a week after three other big banks – Citigroup, J.P. Morgan and Morgan Stanley – announced their own “Carbon Principles” – voluntary standards those banks say will make them less likely to underwrite financing on conventional coal-fired power plants.

Japan, famous for its hybrid cars and solar panels, may become an environmental pioneer in another sense: buying cheap carbon offsets abroad to minimize the burden on its domestic industry to clean up its act at home.

The U.S. can follow Denmark’s lead and get 20% of its electricity from wind by 2030, the Department of Energy said today. The only obstacles, according to the DOE report, are building the wind turbines, improving them, getting them in place, and getting their electricity to where it’s used. Piece of cake.

Like the rest of Big Oil, Royal Dutch Shell is like a party-goer on St. Patrick’s Day: desperately looking for something green. Its latest move? A joint-venture with a Hawaiian firm to develop biofuels out of algae.

John McCain and more than a score of fellow Republicans called on the Environmental Protection Agency to scupper, or at least reconsider, the ethanol mandates passed in the last energy bill. The bill calls for a five-fold increase in U.S. ethanol production through 2022. President Bush reiterated the need for more “renewable fuels” in his Rose Garden climate speech last month.

Ballooning gasoline prices aren’t just changing how people drive—they may soon change where people live. With gas stuck above $3.00 a gallon, those cheaper houses in the suburbs can be a money-losing proposition in the end.

The demand-driven surge in commodity prices of all kinds — whether oil, metals or grains — means blockbuster profits have been matched by soaring costs, particularly for new projects using cutting-edge technologies. Meanwhile, aging plants and fields are proving less reliable, making core businesses less profitable even as oil prices hit new highs.

But a new study by the Harvard School of Public Health could throw a wrench in that argument, by suggesting that heat waves are deadlier than cold snaps – if true, that means the winter-time benefit of a warmer planet may be more than offset by an increase in deaths in the summer.

Germany's Q-Cells AG, the world's second-largest manufacturer of solar cells by volume, is throwing funding as well as manufacturing muscle behind a California start-up's new technology to lower the cost of generating electricity from the sun's rays.

In neighborhoods across the country, there's a battle brewing: the environmentalists vs. the aesthetes.

Investing in new nuclear power plants, which produce electricity 24 hours a day and seven days a week, can be a major growth engine for our economy. Nuclear plants can be located close to growing demand centers, and next to existing transmission lines. Renewables, which produce power intermittently, must often be sited far from cities and the grid.