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The House Energy and Commerce Committee is expected to pass legislation this week that would overhaul U.S. energy and global warming policy, assuming Democrats can stay united in the face of hundreds of GOP amendments. Unveiled Friday, H.R. 2454 (pdf) includes items long sought by environmentalists, including a cap-and-trade program to curb greenhouse gas emissions and a nationwide renewable electricity standard. The 932-page bill, also comes with the support of President Obama, who applauded the "historic agreement" after weeks of intense negotiations among Democrats representing vastly different regions and economic sectors.

Los Angeles will eliminate the use of electricity made from coal by 2020, replacing it with power from cleaner renewable energy sources, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said. Consumers of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, the largest city-owned utility in the United States with 1.45 million electricity customers, will see higher power bills in the fight against climate change, he added in his inaugural speech for his second four-year term as mayor on Wednesday.

In the world of renewables, most of the attention is on the wind and the sun. Geothermal power just hasn't gotten the same respect. That could be changing, as both the Obama Administration and Silicon Valley are considering the heat under the ground as a potentially huge source of clean, domestic U.S. energy, but recent setbacks are calling into question how much geothermal can contribute. Given the potential benefits, we should be doubling our efforts to make geothermal a viable power source for the U.S. Some background: All thermal power plants use the same basic process. A heat source (burning coal or gas, uranium, concentrated solar energy) is used to turn water into steam, and the energy released turns a turbine that produces electricity. What sets geothermal apart is that the steam comes directly from the ground. Water percolates down through cracks in the ground and is heated to the boiling point by hot rocks underground (in some cases coming back up as a geyser - think Old Faithful), and the resulting steam is drawn up via a well to a turbine.

It seems unlikely that an agreement on the terms of the next climate treaty could be reached at the December-scheduled Copenhagen talks. The United States, not a member of the Kyoto Protocol and one of the major players in the international negotiations tussle over the climate treaty, has not yet reached a consensus over how to reduce carbon emissions and a bill successfully passing through the Senate in 2009 seems quite difficult. The major issues that US lawmakers need to look into are, first, how to make the transition from carbon-intensive fossil fuels to clean renewable energy sources and, second, how to finance this transition without burdening the people with any significant monetary load.

Climate change legislation before Congress would boost electricity prices by about 20 percent by 2030, although most of the increases wouldn't begin until after 2020, a government analysis concluded Tuesday. The Energy Information Administration said the ability to contain the cost to consumers depends largely on whether the country is successful in a "large scale" expansion of nuclear power and renewable energy sources that do not emit greenhouse gases and the deployment of carbon-capture technology at coal plants. Legislation, already approved by the House and expected to be taken up in the Senate later this year, would require carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions be cut by 17 percent over the next 11 years and by 83 percent by mid-century. Opponents of the bill have said such a shift would lead to soaring energy costs, especially for electricity.

-Amory Lovins, a renowned author and big thinker on energy, specializes in making the impossible real. His 4,000-square-foot Colorado home has no furnace, uses a few dollars' worth of electricity a month, and features an indoor tropical garden with banana trees and papaya plants. In conversation, he's quick to pull out his iPhone to show a car prototype inspired by the Hypercar, which is three to five times more efficient than conventional cars. He's the chief scientist and co-founder of nonprofit advisory firm Rocky Mountain Institute, which develops environmentally friendly solutions using business as a lever. Among the organizations it advises are Ford Motor, Wal-Mart, and the Pentagon.

A fascinating new study ranks alternative energies from best to worst -- and showing up last is ethanol. It's time to ban all federal subsidies for this wasteful taxpayer investment in Midwest farmers and this inefficient use of corn to power vehicles across America.

President-elect Barack Obama and leaders in Congress are fashioning a plan to pour billions of dollars into a jobs program to jolt the economy and lay the groundwork for a more energy-efficient economy. The details and cost of the so-called green-jobs program are still unclear, but a senior Obama aide, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a work in progress, said it would probably include the weatherizing of hundreds of thousands of homes, the installation of "smart meters" to monitor and reduce home energy use, and billions of dollars in grants to state and local governments for mass transit and infrastructure projects.

New technologies will permit rapid decarbonization of the world energy economy in the next two decades, according to a new report from the Worldwatch Institute. These new energy sources will make it possible to retire hundreds of coal-fired power plants that now provide 40 percent of the world's power by 2030, eliminating up to one-third of global carbon dioxide emissions while creating millions of new jobs.

There has never been a more important time to invest in green technologies, yet many of us believe these efforts are doomed to failure. What nonsense, writes Chris Goodall

New research from Stanford University ranks wind power as the most promising alternative source of energy. Titled Review of solutions to global warming, air pollution, and energy security, the report from civil and environmental engineering professor Mark Z. Jacobson ranks the world's energy options -- putting wind, concentrated solar and geothermal at the top of the list, and nuclear power and coal with carbon capture and sequestration in a tie for dead last. ... From his findings, Jacobson is able to suggest that the U.S. government invest money and create jobs around the development of wind, solar and geothermal: "There is a lot of talk among politicians that we need a massive jobs program to pull the economy out of the current recession," Jacobson said. "Well, putting people to work building wind turbines, solar plants, geothermal plants, electric vehicles and transmission lines would not only create jobs but would also reduce costs due to health care, crop damage and climate damage from current vehicle and electric power pollution, as well as provide the world with a truly unlimited supply of clean power."

ndiana, United States [RenewableEnergyWorld.com] The Joint Coordinated System Plan (JCSP'08), the first step of a transmission and generation system expansion analysis of the majority of the Eastern Interconnection, estimates the electricity sector will need more than US $80 billion in new transmission infrastructure to obtain 20% of the region's electricity from wind energy generation. "This is information we believe that our leaders need to consider as they begin work under a new administration and start defining our energy future." -- John Bear, President and CEO, Midwest ISO This initial analysis, which was performed with participation from major transmission owners and operators in the Eastern U.S., looked at two scenarios to examine transmission and generation possibilities between 2008 and 2024. The first, a Reference Scenario, assumes "business as usual" with respect to wind development, with approximately 5% of the region's energy coming from wind. The second was a 20% Wind Energy Scenario and was based on the U.S. Department of Energy's Eastern Wind Integration and Transmission Study.

Tens of thousands of Americans have written in with questions, ideas, and suggestions about what the Obama-Biden administration should do on this important issue. In this short video, Heather Zichal, a member of the Energy and Environment Policy Team, responds to some of those questions and ideas. Watch the video below -- then use the form at the right to submit your own thoughts on energy and the environment.

On Applied Hope and Optimism: Applied hope is not mere optimism. The optimist treats the future as fate, not choice, and thus fails to take responsibility for making the world we want. Applied hope is a deliberate choice of heart and head. The optimist, says RMI Trustee David Orr, has his feet up on the desk and a satisfied smirk knowing the deck is stacked. The person living in hope has her sleeves rolled up and is fighting hard to change or beat the odds. Optimism can easily mask cowardice. Hope requires fearlessness.

Global recession? Must be time for the media's alternative-energy backlash My father used to say of his profession that newspaper editors are the people who come down from the mountaintop at the end of the battle and shoot the wounded. A massive credit crunch and a drop in the price of fossil fuels can mean only one thing to the editors of the traditional media -- an excuse for their favorite activity in the whole world, the backlash story. Faster than you can say "Joe the Plumber" isn't a licensed plumber, his name isn't Joe, and he has a tax lien against him, you can be sure that if the media ever lets itself fawn over you for even a nano-second, it will turn its coverage on a dime and run the minute a few whispy short-term clouds appear in the horizon. And so we have the New York Times story, "Alternative Energy Suddenly Faces Headwinds," which is supposed to be a clever headline, but the NYT, which accompanies the story with a picture of wind turbines, seems to have missed the irony that wind turbines like strong winds.

Big Stone II's demise is not a bad sign for wind, it is the opposite. Now is the opportunity to move ahead to the next economy, not to worry about what we lost with a big polluter. Let's give this gift to our future generations - a better future. Take a deep breath and let's take a look at what the next energy economy will look like. We will move to an entirely non-fossil fuel economy based on solar and wind. We will have 89,000 solar photovoltaic and concentrated solar panels, 1.7 million rooftop PV systems to reduce combustion on most of our houses and perhaps solar water as well. We will have 3.8 million wind turbines worldwide taking up a total area smaller than the size of Manhattan. When the wind doesn't blow in South Dakota, it blows in North Dakota, or Nebraska, or the steppes of Russia. Distributed wind is where we should be headed. And hydro-power can "firm" intermittent wind - we have plenty of dams on the Missouri.

Big Stone II's demise is not a bad sign for wind, it is the opposite. Now is the opportunity to move ahead to the next economy, not to worry about what we lost with a big polluter. Let's give this gift to our future generations - a better future. Take a deep breath and let's take a look at what the next energy economy will look like. We will move to an entirely non-fossil fuel economy based on solar and wind. We will have 89,000 solar photovoltaic and concentrated solar panels, 1.7 million rooftop PV systems to reduce combustion on most of our houses and perhaps solar water as well. We will have 3.8 million wind turbines worldwide taking up a total area smaller than the size of Manhattan. When the wind doesn't blow in South Dakota, it blows in North Dakota, or Nebraska, or the steppes of Russia. Distributed wind is where we should be headed. And hydro-power can "firm" intermittent wind - we have plenty of dams on the Missouri.

The meetings, to be held in Washington in April and in La Maddalena, Italy, in July, will seek to resolve longstanding issues that have blocked the development of an international climate treaty. The participants, who include Chinese and Indian representatives, will also try to create "concrete initiatives and joint ventures that increase the supply of clean energy while cutting greenhouse gas emissions,"� according to a White House news release. The talks, called the Major Economies Meetings on Energy Security and Climate Change, echo in name and goals an initiative begun in the last two years of the Bush administration.

Climate change. Energy independence. Air pollution. There are countless arguments for moving beyond fossil fuels for our energy needs. Unfortunately, there are just as many hurdles that must be cleared before we can feasibly count on other sources to supplant oil, coal and natural gas, which currently provide the lion's share of U.S. electricity generation and transportation fuels.