It was obvious: had the marriage not been a mirrage it would have been staged in October to create a huge "Family" event before the election and before the little bastard was born.

It was clear from the beginning that the two kids struck a deal with mom and the GOP to toe the line until after the election. Meanwhile the state-sponsored cycle of abstinence-based ignorance and infants continues.

The main point of the article is that the green power label can be coopted to subsidize coal. Intelligent energy policy has to start with figuring out how to reward desired power company behavior and penalize coal exploitation. It is not yet clear whether Dr Chu or Pres. Obama will have the political savvy to prevent political subversion of energy redevelopment by the existing energy lobbies.

Local wind and solar production has much lower transmission losses but is too diffuse to allow power storage. This means a mix of local production and big farms is necessary and there is not really a choice of using one over another. Germany has emphasized solar despite it's Northern location, solar production is a better choice for the US. The most efficient policy will reward not just production but also conservation - the easiest but least sexy way to increase energy availability. Insulation and things like solar hot water and good lighting design are easy but spread among thousands of small companies with little political clout and inhibited by thousands of local building codes.

...just saying

As usual, the conservative groups are lying in God's name:

From NYTIMES:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/18/nyregion/18grove.html

Every three years since 1989, the association has applied for, and received, tax exemptions for its boardwalk, beach and the pavilion under the Green Acres Program, designed to encourage the use of privately owned lands for public recreation and conservation. This is the first time any part of its application has been turned down.

[the pavilion, used for weddings, lost its exemption, the remaining (99%) of the property did not.]

Conservation of energy sets a limit on what you can do with any techology - there are no magic bullets for energy. The breaktrough institute is substituting magical thinking for reality at a time when there is no time to waste. There ARE many ways to do better with conservation, innovation and alternative sources, success will come from doing all of them.

Solar energy and wind are already near 20% efficiency, at the most optimistic we might double that - or equivalently halve the cost. Both are near price break-even now but are capital intensive.

No one will invest in alternative energy or fuel efficiency unless they know they won't be bankrupted by another energy price collapse. After the 73 gas crisis there was a wave of investment in alternative energy but then the oil companies and OPEC dropped gas prices and investors lost their shirts. It's about to happen again.

Eventually, as we move further past peak oil, the price will stay high and we will have a desperate and belated struggle to find alternatives. Meanwhile we will have lost another decade or so of oil. First and foremost, cap and trade and energy taxes are necessary to provide price STABILITY to allow new capital intensive investment.

On their website, behind a lot of "innovating" and rhetoric the only thing they actually propose is government technology research investment. Their other articles include attacks on doing anything such as insulation for existing homes since it would only be a x% of usage (ignoring new construction and industry.) Other screeds advocate subsidies for alternative energy rather than taxes on carbon, except this article seems to say now they want a direct carbon tax but at the same time they say the only way to success is to not raise the price of energy. I guess whatever is proposed they are for something else.

The reality is we need as much as we can of everything we can do. Research is useful but this isn't computers - you can't make it cheaper and more efficient by making it smaller. Conservation of energy is a real limit and big machines to extract energy from sun or wind or whatever will always cost real money. Massive capital investment requires price stability at a value high enough to reward investment. Whether you get that from cap and trade or direct taxes or a mix doesn't matter, the price matters. Yes, the holes in the legislation are a problem but this means push to close the holes, not scrap everything and give up on what is politcally possible.