The arrival of more fuel-efficient cars and trucks promising cleaner air and more energy independence is being set back as automakers worldwide scramble to hoard cash in an industry meltdown. Carlos Ghosn, CEO of Japan's Nissan Motor and France's Renault, on Wednesday warned that automakers "can't find the financing" for aggressive development of so-called green cars. In a keynote speech at the L.A. Auto Show media preview, Ghosn said companies must husband cash to survive an auto recession expected to last until 2010.

Both the beauty and the fragility of the planet were on spectacular display Monday as TODAY reported on climate change and the power of water from the Ends of the Earth. Hosts Matt Lauer, Meredith Vieira, Al Roker and Ann Curry signed in simultaneously from the Western Hemisphere's longest coral reef in Belize; drought-stricken Australia, the world's driest inhabited continent; Iceland, where fire meets ice; and 13,000 feet up the flank of Mount Kilimanjaro, the "Roof of Africa," whose famous snows and glaciers are on pace to disappear within the next dozen years. Water covers 71 percent of the Earth's surface, but, as Lauer, Vieira, Roker and Curry reported, 1.1 billion people - a sixth of the planet's human population - do not have access to a clean supply of this most precious and essential resource.

A federal judge on Wednesday issued a ruling that could clear the way for a multimillion-dollar payout of punitive damages to thousands of commercial fishermen and others who claimed harm from the Exxon Valdez oil spill of 1989. Click to enlarge Click to enlarge Judge Russel Holland Story tools Comments (18) Recommend (0) E-mail a friend Print Digg this Seed Newsvine Send link via AIM Add to My Yahoo! Yahoo! Buzz Font size : A | A | A Judge H. Russel Holland of Anchorage rejected a bid from one plaintiff, Sea Hawk Seafoods Inc., to throw out a complex allocation plan for the damages and replace it with one that would steer potentially millions more dollars to the company.

The House Natural Resources Committee has just announced hearings next week into the latest scandal to grip a federal agency under the Bush administration. Turns out an Interior Department agency in charge of collecting oil and natural gas royalties was compromised for years, investigators said, alleging that employees improperly accepted gifts from oil companies, handed out sweetheart deals, had sex with subordinates and used illegal drugs. As the Los Angeles Times described it, investigators spent two years examining the cozy relationship between the energy industry and the Minerals Management Service, an obscure Interior Department agency that issues lucrative drilling leases to energy companies and then collects royalties from leases of the land, which is owned by taxpayers.

Many local authorities use commingling - which sounds like more fun than it is, all it means is that co-mingled collections are the ones where previously separated waste is crushed together in the back of a dustcart. Once this happens, it's almost impossible to separate the recycled materials again, so what happens to the waste? Often it's taken to Materials Recovery Facilities where large amounts of energy are used to try and separate the waste again. Or it's shipped to India and spread out in fields where people then try to hand pick it back to the original categories. But it's also often just … dumped in landfill. Precisely what we were told recycling was going to stop in the first place.

The biggest fight playing out inside-the-beltway this week is Rep. Henry Waxman's in your face challnge to Rep. John Dingell (D-MI) for the Chairmanship of the House Energy & Commerce Committee. Dingell is 81 and has been the Committee's top Democrat for 25 years who, hailing from Michigan draws his power from the once-influential, now-embattled automobile industry; Waxman is combative, liberal who carries a green energy in his pocket that flies in the face of Dingell's hesitation to do anything that could run counter to the interests of the auto industry.

Last week I attended a discussion entitled After the Election: Where is Cleantech Headed Now? hosted by TiE(The Indus Entrepreneurs) at their Silicon Valley headquarters. The event was moderated by Andrew Chung ofLightspeed Venture Partners with presentations by Chris Flavin of Worldwatch Institute and Dr. Dick Swanson, founder of SunPower. Needless to say, the room was full of some very smart, visionary people with a singular focus on exploring the state of the energy sector and the potential of renewable energy to bring solutions to a beleaguered economy and stressed environment (one might say to civilization and the natural systems that support it).

As workers scramble to build an $800 million coal-fired power plant on a patch of farmland here, a crisis that began on faraway Wall Street threatens to stretch America's power supplies to the brink - driving up prices and laying the stage for future shortages. The power industry is under extraordinary financial pressure just five years after North America suffered its worst blackout ever, when rolling outages turned out the lights on 50 million people. Even before the extent of the global credit crisis was fully known, the nation's largest power providers warned of even bigger blackouts to come with the power grid under ever growing strain.

flash video of the impacts of water by Leonard Dicaprio.

Just days before a scheduled Board of Supervisors' vote Tuesday on a "clean energy" plan, Pacific Gas and Electric Co. submitted a brief summary of its proposal to join with local governments to boost use of renewable energy. The PG&E summary, which contained few details, was submitted to the county on Friday in advance of supervisors' decision on whether to join a Marin County joint powers authority that would compete with PG&E for Marin customers. Supporters of the Marin Clean Energy initiative say the authority would match PG&E's rates while substantially reducing use of nonrenewable, "dirty" energy required to meet Marin County's energy needs.

On this basis, we estimate that the average observed decline rate worldwide is 6.7%. Were that rate applied to 2007 crude oil production the annual loss of output would be 4.7mmbpd.

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.

Advanced drilling techniques that blast millions of gallons of water into 400-million-year-old shale formations a mile underground are opening up "unconventional" gas fields touted as a key to the nation's energy future. These deposits, where natural gas is so tightly locked in deep rocks that it's costly and complicated to extract, include the Barnett shale in Texas, the Fayetteville of Arkansas, and the Haynesville of Louisiana. But the mother lode is the Marcellus shale underlying the Appalachians.

Light pollution in the broad sense refers to any nighttime artificial light that shines where it's not needed. This nocturnal brightness can disorient humans and a host of other animals, confounding eyes and biological rhythms that evolved in a world without such light. One way stray rays pollute is sky glow, the scattering of light by clouds and atmospheric particles that makes it difficult to see stars and other features of the night sky-an increasing problem. These maps show the global extent of sky glow. More than just snapshots of the Earth at night, they account for the light-scattering effects of clouds and dust, and show how bright the sky is above a given point on the ground-revealing that most of the world's population lives under night skies fuzzy with the haze of reflected light.

Tens of thousands have gathered in Sydney's CBD to urge the Federal Government to adopt a swifter response to the climate crisis. Despite grey skies, a colourful crowd showed up in Martin Place today to support the Nature Conservation Council of NSW's fourth Walk Against Warming march. Some were dressed as polar bears. Others wore windmills on their backs. Others carried placards of penguins with messages that read: "Don't build your home on my home", and "Some like it hot, penguins not".

Bail out General Motors? The people who murdered our mass transit system? First let them remake what they destroyed. GM responded to the 1970s gas crisis by handing over the American market to energy-efficient Toyota and Honda. GM met the rise of the hybrids with "light trucks." GM built a small electric car, leased a pilot fleet to consumers who loved it, and then forcibly confiscated and trashed them all.

The Bush administration gave energy companies steep discounts in the royalties they will be required to pay as it established the groundwork Monday for commercial oil shale development on federal land. Interior Department officials said the 5 percent royalty rate during the first five years of production was needed to spur drilling while still giving taxpayers a fair return. But that rate is much lower than the 12.5 percent to 18.8 percent the government collects from companies harvesting conventional oil and gas on public lands.

The natural gas industry refuses to reveal what is in the mixture of chemicals used to drill for the fossil fuel State regulators and Washington lawmakers though are increasingly impatient with voluntary measures and are seeking to toughen their oversight. In September U.S. Congresswoman Diana DeGette and Congressman John Salazar, from Colorado, and Congressman Maurice Hinchey, from New York, introduced a bill that would undo the exemptions in the 2005 Energy Policy Act. Wyoming, widely known for supporting energy development, has begun updating its regulations at a local level, as have parts of Texas. New Mexico has placed a one year moratorium on drilling around Santa Fe, after a survey found hundreds of cases of water contamination from unlined pits where fracking fluids and other drilling wastes are stored. "Every rule that we have improved . . . industry has taken us to court on," said Joanna Prukop, New Mexico's cabinet secretary for Energy Minerals and Natural Resources. "It's industry that is fighting us on every front as we try to improve our government enforcement, protection, and compliance… We wear Kevlar these days."

Scientists, environmentalists and government and industry officials from around the world meet this week for a summit on greenhouse gas emissions that their host, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, hopes will highlight the economic benefits of pursuing green technologies. The conference, which begins Tuesday in Beverly Hills with some 700 participants expected, is an attempt by the Republican governor to influence a U.N. gathering in Poland next month.

Just what does it take before a revolutionary discovery is accepted by the world's scientific community? That's the question raised by renewed claims by a US-based company to have found a radically new source of energy. According to BlackLight Power (BLP) of New Jersey, prototypes of its latest power generators have just been successfully tested by a team of independent experts. As the generators are environmentally-friendly and produce energy at less than a quarter the cost of conventional sources, one might expect scientists to be hailing this breakthrough. But there's one small problem: the supposed source of the power defies conventional theories about the nature of atoms.