by Mike Smith and Contributor Liz Bush

A hub of gadgets and gizmos were on display at RETECH 2010 in Washington this week, clearly the technology of tomorrow. The display gave attendees the eerie feeling of walking through a green-themed Star Trek set.

There were 100% CO2 neutral Mack trucks from Volvo, solar energy panels, windmills, advanced water filtration systems, and even a booth urging passerby’s to “invest in Denmark.”  Copenhagen was the site of COP15 in December last year and is leveraging its UN Climate Change Summit for economic development.

Experts on finance, national security, education, business, legislation, and more came together to offer their advice and opinions regarding the importance of investing in alternative energy at the companion conference.

Aimee Christensen from Christensen Global Strategies believes that this is a “critical moment for the future.” Global business and opportunities are being taken elsewhere to countries with clear energy plans. “We will become significantly less competitive if [clean energy] is not pursued.”

Boyden Gray, the president of Boyden Gray & Associates, and former US Ambassador ... read more >>

The Sierra Club and American Electric Power, the nation’s largest coal-burning utility, don’t agree on much, but there is this:

Money does grow on trees.

Along with other big environmental groups and such businesses as Duke Energy and El Paso Corp., they are part of a coalition that wants to use markets to protect the world’s forests and curb climate change.

The coalition—called Avoided Deforestation Partners, a name that will never win a branding contest—is the brainchild of Jeff Horowitz, a 58-year-old architect and newcomer to the environmental movement who has quietly become an influential player as climate change legislation inches its way through a divided Congress.

Protecting forests “is our single most important strategy, with respect to solving the climate crisis,” Horowitz says. “If we don’t tackle forestry immediately, we can’t buy enough time to get at the technological advances we need and scale them.”

I met Jeff in December at the UN climate talks in Copenhagen, and visited him last week at his office in a lovely, hilly neighborhood of Berkeley. A mechanism to protect forests by steering millions of dollars from the developed world to poor countries, known ... read more >>

It must be Climate Geek Christmas, because there’s a new service available from the NOAA:

NOAA Reorganizes With Eye Toward Assessing Effects of Climate Change:

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration launched a new climate service today, a reorganization effort aimed at improving long-range assessments of climate change, sea-level rise and severe weather.

The effort is aimed at providing long-term forecasts to assist fisheries managers, farmers, state governments, renewable energy developers, water managers and others.

Commerce Secretary Gary Locke likened the new climate shop to the 140-year-old National Weather Service, recounting how weather forecasting helped citizens prepare for the blizzard that slammed the mid-Atlantic region last weekend.

“This will provide a single point of contact, a one-stop shop for businesses and government that need NOAA’s high-quality forecasting for making predictions,” Locke said. “They turn to the Weather Service for making predictions in the short range, now we need the climate service … because increasingly climate change is affecting everyone’s bottom line.”

The NOAA initiative would bring together existing climate ...

New technologies challenge our ability to manage them.  Do you recall that many users of social networks like MySpace and Facebook were chagrined to discover that their personal information has achieved immortality on the Internet?  In many cases, users failed to appreciate the ramifications of their decisions about sharing information.  The harm in some cases in which privacy was compromised was mere embarrassment, but in other scenarios the damage could be more serious. 

Could the new personal energy consumption data that will be available through new Smart Grid technologies and services have the potential for malicious as well as beneficial use?  The answer is yes.  Leaving aside all discussion of security, here are my answers to the questions posed last week to help you understand the need for strong privacy protections of our personal energy consumption data:    

1. Who “owns” my personal energy consumption data?  Me.  I own it, and I give permission to service providers to have access to it.  Of course, the entity that delivers electricity must have certain data to bill customers for the total amount of energy ...

Our favorite climate de-crocker, Peter Sinclair has now started putting together videos on clean energy solutions:

Plug ins are indeed a core climate (and peak oil) solution.  If you want to know more, here’s where to start:

• Plug-in hybrids and electric cars — a core climate solution
• GM Shows Off Their New 230mpg Chevy Volt
• World’s top energy economist warns peak oil threatens recovery, urges immediate action: “We have to leave oil before oil leaves us.”
• Why electricity is the only alternative fuel that can lead to energy independence
• CMU study suggests GM has wildly oversized the batteries in the Chevy Volt plug-in hybrid
• So what is it like to actually drive the Chevy Volt plug in hybrid electric car?
• Does anyone think battery swap out is useful or even needed for electric vehicles?

The one last piece of the puzzle is the possibility of an aftermarket for the batteries.  The requirements for a PHEV battery are much more demanding, say, what a utility or renewable energy company might require of a battery for storage of electricity.  So after the battery is no longer useful for the car, it still has value...

Whilst in Adelaide, Tom Blees gave two talks. His Q&A session at the Royal Institution of Australia was a great success. Head over here to listen to the audio of his chat with Prof. Mike Young, and the subsequent question time. The 2nd event was the ‘nuclear debate’, when Tom and I went head-to-head with Mark Diesendorf (UNSW) and David Noonan (ACF). We (the Environment Institute) recorded this debate in audio format, and Slow TV videoed it (although disappointingly, they missed most of the Q&A, which was where the sparks flew). I’ll post back here when the Slow TV video is up.

The nuclear debate was pretty entertaining, although the format really didn’t allow for many important issues to be thrashed out in convincing detail. As others have noted in comments on BNC, Diesendorf took to personally attacking my credentials, which I thought was unprofessional and totally ... read more >>