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You may have seen the TreeHugger interview with Goldman Environmental Prize winner Yu Xiaogang where he talks about hydropower in China and the tradeoff between increasing power supply and the environmental and community concerns of doing so. For some more info on the issues surrounding developing hydropower on the Nu River, including an overview of the traditional, micro and small-scale hydropower usage on the river, check out this video clip from China's Green Beat. Good stuff, with applicability to any number of different types of big-push style projects in the developing world.

GM (GM) says we still don't get it. If we don't save them, they're gonna nuke the economy to all hell. In case dire warnings of billions and billions in losses aren't enough to freak you out, the company has posted a scare-video on YouTube, complete with ominous music and the kind of overwrought imagery you might got during a preview for 60 Minutes.

Next month is the ASPO conference in Sacramento CA. Nate Hagens will be one of the speakers in the plenary (as well as on the Sunday TOD breakout panels). Here is a video of the talk he gave last year at the international ASPO VI venue in Cork Ireland. The speech covered net energy, energy properties and externalities on the supply side and addiction, relative fitness and steep discount rates from an evolutionary perspective on the demand side. Here is a link to the slides themselves, (which aren't fully shown at times on the video).

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.

What videos have you seen that you think others might be interested in? Here are a few I found:

flash video of the impacts of water by Leonard Dicaprio.

"Dr. Gina Solomon, a Senior Scientist with the NRDC is worried that fishermen enlisted to clean up oil may be unwittingly facing severe health risks. You see, in the effort to clean up the massive oil spill that's leeching across the Gulf of Mexico, BP has employed hundreds, if not thousands, of fishermen. Typically, they're equipped with booms, given a safety course, and then head out to tackle the spill. Problem is the oil itself, and the fumes it gives off, are toxic -- and the fishermen may not be getting the adequate gear to protect themselves from it. In this brief video, Dr. Solomon explains what risks the fishermen face, and what exactly they should be wearing. "

This week global activist group Avaaz began airing a spoof ad that takes direct aim at ExxonMobil's cheery ad campaign featuring scientists talking about how they're making the clean energy of the future. A company spokesman responded to the ad: "They seem to be critical of our desire to communicate our positions on climate change, which we don't understand." Funny -- we don't understand your position on climate change either, ExxonMobil! (zing). You say you want to make the world cleaner through chemistry, but then you lobby hard to make sure that won't happen. See the videos -- and help get Avaaz's ad on CNN -- below.

Pharyngula has some great video of a containment wall in Tennessee failing, releasing a vast flood of toxic coal sludge - Let's talk about clean coal. When power plants burn coal to produce energy, the coal doesn't just vanish into the atmosphere to cause global warming. No, there's a substantial amount of left-over sludge called coal ash, a nasty mess that is enriched for toxic heavy metals. It is seriously nasty stuff. This glop has to be stored, somewhere, usually piled up and walled-off, because it's not healthy for anything. Behold what happens when the containment walls fail.

A tale of 2 power plants: Tennessee's experience shows how environmental concerns can be misdirected On Dec. 22, a deluge of coal-ash slurry broke through a retaining wall near the Kingston Fossil Plant, a power plant in eastern Tennessee. Black sludge inundated a valley and destroyed houses as it surged down to the Emory River, where hundreds of fish soon lay dead on fouled banks. Helicopter video footage showed a landscape resembling the moon's surface, with more than a billion gallons of sludge covering 300 acres. The disaster also temporarily halted an incoming train loaded with coal. This presumably came from other industrially ravaged landscapes to the east, where entire Appalachian mountaintops are routinely bulldozed into valleys to access seams of Paleozoic carbon.

Google has released an iGoogle gadget that tracks petrol prices - iGoogle: Petrol Price Tracker. I'm not sure if it works outside Australia, but it seems to work fine for Sydney. As they say in the video, you are better off cycling, walking or taking public transport - but if you have to drive, this will help make it less expensive.

oncerned locals are taking a stand against mountaintop removal at an upcoming protest march called Related content Leveling AppalachiaOn the MARCC86 the CO2 ASAPArrested EconomyShedding Light on a Deal Related to:walksmytheenergydukecoalprotestremovalsays Walk Past Coal for a Sustainable Future. Sponsored by Footprints for Peace, the walk will protest Duke Energy's expansion of its coalburning Cliffside Power Plant in the Carolinas. The action corresponds with a simultaneous protest at Duke's Charlotte headquarters. The five-mile walk will begin on the campus of Xavier University, pass by the Duke Energy offices downtown and end at Fountain Square. A 15-minute video from Kentuckians for the Commonwealth of Mountaintop Removal will be featured at the end of the march, along with several speakers in opposition to the plant expansion.

An environmental disaster of epic proportions has occurred in Tennessee. Monday night, 2.6 million cubic yards (the equivalent of 525.2 million gallons, 48 times more than the Exxon Valdez spill by volume) of coal ash sludge broke through a dike of a 40-acre holding pond at TVA's Kingston coal-fired power plant covering 400 acres up to six feet deep, damaging 12 homes and wrecking a train. According to the EPA the cleanup will take at least several weeks, but could take years. Officials also said that the magnitude of this spill is such that the entire area could be declared a federal superfund site.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBC2YqFuZ8k From the people who brought you Economic Collapse... It's another Wall Street Dip Shit! Meet Mr. Stephen Moore of the Wall Street Journal, Heritage Foundation, and Cato Institute [Stephen Moore] "I'm not a believer in peak oil, I'm a big believer in the Julian Simon idea that these [oil] are infinite resources, not finite resources. And the reason for that is that oil comes from the human mind, it doesn't come from the ground! [T. Boone Pickens] I don't understand, Steve, when you said oil is not from the ground but it's in the human mind. What does that mean? [Stephen Moore] Well what I mean is that it's human ingenuity that uh...it used to be that people first discovered oil it was just this black gloop that came out of the ground and nobody had any use for it...Do you agree with that?

Calamitous Web Bot Predictions George Ure and his colleague 'Cliff', two self-described "time monks," shared dire predictions based on their web bot technology. Their method captures changes in language patterns within Internet discussions. This aggregated data is then processed with software to determine various keywords, which they interpret in a predictive fashion. Beginning on October 7, 2008 and running through March 2009, they foresee a calamitous period on an epic scale. America will be beset by a variety of problems, which they broke down as 45-48% related to the economy, 40% concerning the military, and the rest associated with natural disasters. Between 2 and 22 million lives could be lost or seriously impacted, they estimated, possibly related to a "global coastal event" in 2009. On Dec. 10-12th, 2008, a large quake could hit the Pacific Northwest, they added. The two recommended developing self-sufficiency and the ability to live off the grid.

Peak oil theory states that oil will have a beginning, middle, and an end of production, and at some point it will reach a level of maximum output. It is estimated that approximately half of all oil...

Bob Hirsch talking "Worst Case Scenarios" for Oil...as in "maybe $500/bbl" in the next few years...with increasing uncertainty/volatility (yes, that's right, oil could snap back down to $100/bbl, but then snap back up even higher again in a few months...without even considering geopolitics and other "above ground factors," which of course we must.)