Image Credit: Talking Points Memo

RIP, Energy Bill: Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced he didn’t have the votes to pass a climate-change bill that puts a price on greenhouse gases. With that statement one of Obama’s major campaign promises crashed to earth, along with hopes for slowing global warming or using cleantech to jump-start the U.S. economy. In place of a real energy bill is an “energy bill” that gives homeowners efficiency rebates and regulates deepwater oil drilling. But with a midterm election in the offing and more Republicans likely heading to Congress, the notion of cap-and-trade is, well, cap-and-dead.

BP Plugs the Spew in Gulf, Boardroom: Having capped its oil spill for what might be for good, BP replaced its foot-in-mouth CEO Tony Hayward with Robert Dudley, an American who says he’ll make safety his top goal. Meanwhile, while no one was paying attention, Obama became the first president to take a stab at managing the oceans.

NYC Water’s Hot, McDonald’s Not: When it comes to local sourcing, in New York City tap water we trust. McDonald’s, not so much.

LEAF is Cheaper, Volt Goes Farther. Who Wins? General Motors finally named a price for the Chevy Volt: $41,000, or about $8K more than its electric rival, the Nissan LEAF. In its defense, Chevy argues that the Volt can go 340 miles with its “extended range” gas engine, while the LEAF’s battery dies after 100 miles. Who will go the distance with buyers? Time will tell.

Image Credit: NASA

Blow, Google, Blow: The king of search officially became a utility as it arranged to mainline 114 megawatts of power from an Iowa windfarm. Also this week, the Alta Wind Energy Center in the California foothills announced it had secured the funds to grow to 1,550 gigawatts and so become the largest windfarm in the world.

Take the NASA Quiz: This week, NASA unveiled snazzy maps that reveal the answers to two not-so-trivial questions: Where are the tallest trees in the world, and where are the biggest dead zones in the ocean? Let’s tackle the second question first. The U.S. East Coast and Northern Europe have the largest dead zones, victims of too much chemical fertilizer leaking off the farms. The tallest trees (which sequester the most carbon) are in Southeast Asia and in the U.S. Pacific Northwest.

What Matters This Week: A Price for the Volt, but None for Carbon is a post from: The Ferris Files

Less of Mt. Everest to love. Image Credit: Yale Environment 360

This is David’s summary of the week’s news for the Matter Network. To see the original, or post your comments, go here.

$200 Million Buys a Lot of Nutty Ideas: General Electric and its deep-pocketed friends went all X-Prize this week and announced $200 million in rewards for suggestions to help generate more power and improve the grid. Among the entrants so far: energy orchards and solar rocks.

‘Toyotla’ Plans an Electric RAV4: Toyota and Tesla said they’ll resuscitate an electric version of the popular small SUV. Meawhile, GM sought to quell range anxiety in the electric Chevy Volt by offering a giant warranty.

Meat-Eaters: Be Very Scared. For his next trick, superstar scientist Pat Brown will make you stop eating meat whether you like it or not. “Eating one 4-ounce hamburger is equivalent to leaving your bathroom faucet running 24 hours a day for a week,” he said. “We can’t go on like this.”

Barack’s Beloved Batteries: President Obama visited a battery plant in Holland, MI — his fourth such visit since taking office — as signs emerged that the stimulus bill is making the U.S. more competitive. The funding supports nine battery plants under construction and might assist the U.S. capture 40 percent of the world battery market by 2015.

Image Credit: USDA

Everest Shrinks: Mountain photographer David Breashears compared historical photos of Mt. Everest to what he sees through his own lens, and was startled at the result: The surrounding glaciers are melting fast, as is the ice on Everest itself.

Take that, Icarus: Quick on the heels of last week’s record-breaking manned solar flight, the unmanned Zephyr flew for seven days and isn’t even close to coming down. Perhaps someday we’ll even have a hybrid jet.

What Matters This Week: RAV4 Goes Electric, Mt. Everest Melts is a post from: The Ferris Files

The Solar Impulse. Image Credit: Reuters

This is David’s summary of the week’s news for the Matter Network. To see the original, or post your comments, go here.

Solar Plane Goes All Night: A milestone in clean transportation was achieved on Thursday when pilot Andre Borschberg flew the Solar Impulse for 26 hours, setting new altitude and speed records for a solar plane and conducting the first all-night flight on battery energy stored from the sun. Next: a model due in 2011 with a pressurized cabin for transcontinental flight.

Move over, Prius: One of the biggest perks of owning a Toyota Prius or other hybrid in the state of California is access to the highway carpool lane. But — holy halos! Hybrids are set to be booted from the HOV lane in 2011 in favor of  all-electric cars.  Don’t cry, Prius owners: At least you won’t be sucking anyone’s fumes as you park in second place.

Emaciated polar bears. Image Credit: Andrew E. Derocher

In other car news, Ford discovers that soy oil makes rubber twice as stretchy, and the first volleys are fired in the Chevy Volt vs. Nissan LEAF flame war.

Safeway Fakes a Farmer’s Market: When a Safeway in Kirkland, Wash. launched a farmer’s market, there were just a couple problems: no local food, and no farmers. Instead, the supermarket planned to use its own employees to sell industrial produce in the parking lot. The brilliant plan collapsed before the first Chilean avocado was sold; the”market” violated both state and union rules. Compare this to Whole Foods’ declaration last month that it will require all its personal-care suppliers to verify the “organic” claims on their labels.

Why Are the Polar Bears So Hungry? Everyone knows that the melting of the Arctic is bad for polar bears — but will it really kill them off? An interview in Yale Environment 360 explains exactly how melting ice puts the polar bear in peril, and what the prospects are for the magnificent mascot of the North.

The AQUA2 in its native habitat. Image Credit: McGill University

Breakthroughs of the Week: A new road material promises to suck up exhaust from the tailpipe; the little AQUA2 robot conquers land and sea (and looks kinda cute); and undertakers ask for the right to dissolve human corpses and flush ‘em.

What Matters This Week: Solar Planes, Hungry Bears, Fake Farmers’ Markets is a post from: The Ferris Files

Investors Love Tesla:

The Leaf Stampede: Nissan revealed that 90 percent of the U.S. presale orders for the all-electric Leaf are customers new to the Nissan brand. Perhaps there’s a lesson for other companies: Lead the way into green, and a whole new class of customers could follow.

Belkin Kills the Vampire: The company debuted a line of power strips and wall plugs that prevent ‘standby’ mode from bleeding the power bill. The Conserve Insight tells you how much electricity and CO2 a device uses, and the Smart AV power strip shuts down the cable box and DVD player when you switch off the TV.

Photo Credit: Kathleen Cavalaro

Solar Companies Buy the Farm: In Ontario, Canada, Hay Solar and Mann Engineering announced that they’ll buy a farmer a barn if he lets them cover it with solar panels.

Goldman Sachs Tracks Solar: Now really. Would the moneygrubbers at Goldman start covering solar-panel manufacturers like First Solar and SunPower if they weren’t poised to make a ton of cash?

What Matters This Week: Investors Love Tesla, Belkin Kills the Vampire is a post from: The Ferris Files

Lessons from the Deep:

Forests Get Breathing Room: Indonesia’s government agreed to halt the cutting of its rainforests for two years in exchange for $1 billion in ransom. Norway made the offer because Indonesia holds hostage some of the largest remaining rainforests; what’s left around the world might keep more CO2 from the atmosphere than all the world’s cars, trucks, ships and planes combined.

Deforestation = Poor U.S. Farmers? Meanwhile, a report made a persuasive argument that deforestation in the tropics leads to economic ruin for U.S. foresters and farmers. By rapidly clearing land, tropical nations flood the market and undercut Americans’ prices for soybeans, beef, timber, vegetable oil, among others.

GM Retreats from Indian Rival: General Motors pulled out of a partnership with REVA, an Indian electric car company in India, after REVA was acquired by the Indian conglomerate of Mahindra & Mahindra, a major Indian manufacturer that has set its sights on the United States.

Nissan and Zipcar Grow: Nissan broke ground on its battery factory in Smyrna, Tennessee and said it will make 200,000 electric batteries a year. Zipcar announced plans for a $75 million IPO to fuel its own growth in the car sharing, despite competition from rental companies like Hertz and Enterprise.

That’s a Lot of Plug Points: Matter Network’s own John Gartner made headlines with his estimate that in five years, the world will need 4.7 million new charge points for electric cars. A few days later a coalition announced that 4,600 would be installed in nine U.S. cities by Coulomb Technologies and bankrolled with $37 million in government funds. Too bad China provides far more stimulus than the American government does.

Tough to Be a Small Fish: As the big boys jostled, HybridCars pointed out how smaller electric-car companies like Fisker, Coda, Aptera and Tesla have no margin for error as they try to compete.

image credit: picasaweb.google.com/mikelo

Veni, Vidi, Veggie: In the New York Review of Books, Michael Pollan took a look at five books that collectively point to a tying together of what’s loosely known as the “food movement” — urban agriculture, farmland preservation, food labeling, the organic movement, to name a few — into something more than the sum of their parts.

No Free Ride for Factory Farms: The EPA announced that factory farms — exposed in Pollan’s own book “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” — would be identified and their animal waste’s impact on waterways measured. As a result, thousands of Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, or CAFOs, are likely to face new regulations.

Innovations of the Week: Cornell students figure out how to harness electricity from small wind; scientists grow  BPA-free plastic from the atmospheric scourge of CO2.

The Weekly: Deep Ignorance in the Deep Ocean is a post from: The Ferris Files

Image credit: National Geographic

Another Bad Week, Or a Really Good One? Good news grows as slow as a tree, but bad news flows like a broken oil main. That seems to be the lesson from this week as BP, the U.S. government and an armada of ships and volunteers tried but mostly failed to contain the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Though BP had some success at slowing the spigot, oil is pooling in the wetlands of the Mississippi Delta and resides at unmeasured quantities in the deeps. There it has joined the Loop Current with a probable next stop in Florida.

Meanwhile, 1,500 miles north, an equally momentous event drew little attention: an agreement to curtail or end logging on 72 million acres of Canada’s boreal forest, an area roughly the size of France. An unlikely consortium of logging companies and Greenpeace agreed to halt the chainsaws altogether for three years in an area as big as Montana, and to develop a sustainable-forestry program for the remainder. The accord might be the forerunner to permanent protection for an area that encompasses two-thirds of Canada’s logging concessions.

The Week’s Best Green Ideas: This week, GreenTech TV took a look at how Rush University Medical Center has become one of the greenest hospitals in the country. Read Part 1 and Part 2.

At Cleantechies, Chuck Colgan told California building owners, brokers and managers how to prepare for AB 1103, a California law that asks for 12 months of energy-consumption records when a building is sold, re-leased or financed.

Triple Pundit produced a field guide to the three organizations that can help a company develop a framework for its  energy use: The Climate Registry, the US EPA Climate Leaders program, and the Carbon Disclosure Project.

Also, the U.S. Green Building Council told President Obama how his administration can make America’s buildings far more efficient without asking permission from those squirrelly congressmen.

Too Hot? Bring Your Own Water. Last month was the warmest April in recorded history, according to the United Nations. If you’d like to contemplate this alarming news from the shores of Walden Pond, carry your own hydration — the city of Concord has become the first in the country to ban plastic water bottles.

Will Nissan Leaf You Out? Pre-orders for the hit Japanese electric car reached 13,000 this week, a thousand more than Nissan planned to make. If you’d rather not crash the dealership, wait ’till next year and rent one from Hertz.

Quiet Excitement: At Infineon Raceway in California, the TTXGP race pitted electric motorcycles against each other in the first — and the quietest — race of its kind.

Price Check, Aisle Nine: At the Lightfair International convention in Las Vegas, Sylvania, Toshiba and Philips debuted their new LED bulbs for use in home lamps. Each bulb, as well as General Electric’s, will retail by early 2011 or sooner, for $40 to $60.  Also, at the National Hardware Show, Honeywell announced that its $6,500 home wind turbine would arrive at Ace Hardware stores by August.

A Tweet that Really Matters: Populations of 150 North American bird species are plummeting as their habitat is destroyed. Could one source of their salvation reside as an app on your phone?

The Weekly: Oil Spreads, Forest Are Spared, and Green Ideas Sprout is a post from: The Ferris Files

A giant oil cap is lowered into the Gulf of Mexico. Photo courtesy U.S. Coast Guard

Are Offshore Oil Rigs a Threatened Species? Is the Deepwater Horizon spill the beginning of the end for offshore oil drilling, or just another Exxon Valdez? Today, as BP attempted to place a 100-ton cap over the broken well gushing under the Gulf of Mexico, it was uncertain if they’d be able to stanch the spreading damage at sea or in Washington, D.C.

The spill has muddied the prospects for a climate bill as one of its pillars — a new round of offshore oil drilling — founders in unstable political soil, as Mackinnon Lawrence reports. Meanwhile, environmental groups are hustling to make the case, as in this Sierra Club video, that offshore oil is dirty and unsafe.  Perhaps it’s not only brown pelicans and terns who will have trouble flying after all this is over, and the black tide might yet turn against its maker.

Efficiency Experts To America: Stop Dreamin’ and Pick Up Yer Caulkin’ Gun. At a symposium of the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy — what, you missed it? — experts concluded that weatherstripping beats windfarms as the fastest way to save the US economy, and released some numbers to prove it. First, America is not as efficient as it thinks: the domestic economy is only 13 percent efficient, compared to 20 percent efficiency in Japan and some European countries. We were left pondering if it’s more efficient, percentage-wise, to order a veggie pizza from Papa John’s or gnaw on a frozen one from Trader Joe’s.

Even worse, the ACEEE noted, Americans seem to be ignoring efficiency even as they embrace the idea of electric cars, photovoltaic solar panels and Bloom Boxes as solutions to both the energy crunch and our economic revival. The US economy has tripled in size since 1970, and three-quarters of those gains have come from leaps in energy efficiency. The Council’s conclusion: The American economy will recover by caulking its cracks, not by putting giant windmills at sea, slathering our houses in solar paint, or beaming sunlight from space.

Raining on the Electric-Car Parade: Observers warned against the auto industry’s growing adoption of electric cars as the platform of the future when not a single customer has yet taken delivery of one. The German magazine Der Spiegel declared  electric cars an “e-llusion” for two reasons: they’re not zero-emissions, as all those electrons have to come from somewhere, and the industry would die in infancy without massive and expensive state subsidies. A few days later, John Mendel, an executive VP at Honda, warned against “a rush to select a winner that could lead us in the wrong direction.” And yesterday, the site Hybrid Cars said Hey! What about hybrid cars? And noted that Toyota is doubling its output of hybrid Priuses and that carmakers from Hyundai to Ford to Mercedes are planning models or entire series around the gas-electric engine.

Build Whose Dreams? In other auto news, Chinese electric carmaker BYD announced that it would stage its conquest of the United States from a new headquarters in Los Angeles. L.A. politicians applauded. BYD (“Build Your Dreams”) has an acronym in English and a logo that, um, reminds us of the symbol of a certain German automaker. What else does BYD plan to appropriate?

Sanyo Makes Giant Battery Bet: Korean conglomerate Sanyo announced it would invest $2 billion into electric-battery research in hopes of capturing 40 percent of the world market. The company’s expenditure is more than the entire U.S. government’s investment in domestic battery research.

Also Lotus says mainstream carmakers could spend just three percent more money and make their cars 38 percent lighter, if only they were more like Lotus.

Why Is Google Investing in North Dakota Wind? On Monday, Google announced it had invested almost $40 million in a NextEra windfarm in the North Dakota plains, without explaining exactly what it planned to do with the 170 MW of electricity. This isn’t one of the companies’ well-publicized seed investments in new technology. Neither will Google use the juice to power its own data centers, as more and more Silicon Valley companies are doing, as described in this illuminating article in Yale Environment 360. Rather, according to Google’s green-biz manager Rick Needham said, they “expect to earn an attractive return as well as free up capital to enable future wind projects.” Investors take note.

American Superconductor Goes to Sea: Massachusetts-based American Superconductor revealed plans to use its formidable talents in high-capacity electrical cables to make an offshore wind turbine 40 percent more powerful than any that now exist. The SeaTitan will pump out 10 megawatts, enough to power 300 to 400 homes, and is due for unveiling by the end of 2010.

Micro Power, Mega Visibility: Sam’s Club installed micro wind turbines atop the light poles in its store in Palmdale, California, producing 3-5 percent of the facility’s power but engendering 97 percent of its good media coverage. Also, 1,370 of the most heavily-viewed billboards on Florida highways will be outfitted with solar panels or small wind turbines.

Gadget Watch: This week, Pirelli works on a tire that talks to the car; Solar Aero toils on a wind turbine with no blades; and MIT researchers explore how a coating on ferns could make boats move faster.

The Weekly: Oil Rigs, Electric Cars, and Google’s Curious Investment is a post from: The Ferris Files