David Gelbaum has quietly poured nearly $1 billion into environmental companies and causes. He advocates nature preserves and solar energy. (Image: Sandy Huffaker for The New York Times)

It’s not the usual drive of choice for wealthy former hedge fund managers like David Gelbaum. Then again, there’s not much that is business as usual about Mr. Gelbaum, an intensely private person who happens to be one of the nation’s largest — and largely unknown — green technology investors and environmental philanthropists.

Mr. Gelbaum has invested $500 million in clean-tech companies since 2002 through his Quercus Trust, amassing a portfolio of some 40 businesses involved in nearly every aspect of the emerging green economy, be it renewable energy, the smart electric grid, sustainable agriculture, electric cars or biological remediation of oil spills. He has poured almost as much into environmental causes.

Read on: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/09/business/09green.html

Energy secretary Steven Chu has been in office for only a little over a year, but he's nonetheless managed to help lay the groundwork for a fundamental shift in how the US tackles climate change. (Photo: Peter Yang)

It’s late November 2009, and US energy secretary Steven Chu is leaning against a fake sink in a fake kitchen. Chu is 62 years old and athletically trim with graying black hair.

He’s wearing a rumpled pin-striped suit, argyle socks, and gold-framed glasses. Chu is a renowned physicist, a cabinet appointee, and the winner of a Nobel Prize. But that’s not why he’s now being treated like a rock star. This morning a small crowd of scientists, politicians, and local businesspeople are flocking to him because he’s got cash, specifically $75 million in stimulus funds for the Ohio subsidiary of the American Electric Power utility.

Read on: http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/04/ff_stevenchu?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+wired/index+(Wired:+Index+3+(Top+Stories+2))&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher

Smog in Shenyang in northeast China’s Liaoning Province. (Hei Yubai/European Pressphoto Agency)

If you listen to climate scientists — and despite the relentless campaign to discredit their work, you should — it is long past time to do something about emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. If we continue with business as usual, they say, we are facing a rise in global temperatures that will be little short of apocalyptic. And to avoid that apocalypse, we have to wean our economy from the use of fossil fuels, coal above all.

But is it possible to make drastic cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions without destroying our economy?

Like the debate over climate change itself, the debate over climate economics looks very different from the inside than it often does in popular media. The casual reader might have the impression that there are real doubts about whether emissions can be reduced without inflicting severe damage on the economy. In fact, once you filter out the noise generated by special-interest groups, you discover that there is widespread agreement among environmental economists that a market-based program to deal with the threat of climate change — one that limits carbon emissions by putting a price on them — can achieve large results at modest, though not trivial, cost. There is, however, much less agreement on how fast we should move, whether major conservation efforts should start almost immediately or be gradually increased over the course of many decades.

In what follows, I will offer a brief survey of the economics of climate change or, more precisely, the economics of lessening climate change. I’ll try to lay out the areas of broad agreement as well as those that remain in major dispute. First, though, a primer in the basic economics of environmental protection.

Read on: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/11/magazine/11Economy-t.html?pagewanted=1&partner=rss&emc=rss

(Image by snazzo/Flickr)

Read on: http://daily.sightline.org/daily_score/series/the-parable-of-the-electric-bike

A view of loading operations from the bridge of the Eugen Maersk at Bremerhaven, Germany. (Image: Gordon Welters for The New York Times)

It took more than a month for the container ship Ebba Maersk to steam from Germany to Guangdong, China, where it unloaded cargo on a recent Friday — a week longer than it did two years ago.

But for the owner, the Danish shipping giant Maersk, that counts as progress.

In a global culture dominated by speed, from overnight package delivery to bullet trains to fast-cash withdrawals, the company has seized on a sales pitch that may startle some hard-driving corporate customers: Slow is better.

By halving its top cruising speed over the last two years, Maersk cut fuel consumption on major routes by as much as 30 percent, greatly reducing costs. But the company also achieved an equal cut in the ships’ emissions of greenhouse gases.

Read on: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/17/business/energy-environment/17speed.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

What? You want me to do something more to help the environment? I recycle, ya know!

So environmentally, my frame of mind was: No pain, no gain.

Read on: http://invw.org/2010/02/consumers-really-can-affect-global-warming-particularly-if-they-live-in-the-united-states/

By Anthony B. Robinson | Crosscut.com | February 5, 2010

Carbon offsets: If you fly, must you buy? Airplanes landing at Amsterdam's Schiphol airport (Photo: Magnus Baeck/via Wikimedia Commons)

Actually, I liked the idea and the website, and was heartened to see that driving my Honda Insight (hybrid) for the last 10 years, a car that still gets 55 miles a gallon, helped balance out my sins as a frequent flyer.

But the Protestant in me did find myself wondering if this were some sort of new system of indulgences. Remember indulgences? It was abuse of the system of indulgences within the Catholic Church that was a spur to the Protestant Reformation some 500 years ago. The wealthy could buy their way into heaven, or into the good graces of the church hierarchy, or both, depending on your view. Martin Luther thought it tacky.

Read on: http://crosscut.com/2010/02/05/climate/19571/

LEAH BETH WARD | YAKIMA HERALD-REPUBLIC | December 13, 2009

ELLENSBURG – Gary Nystedt was brainstorming with a group of colleagues at a solar energy conference a few years ago when the idea hit him.

What if Ellensburg put up solar panels in a park and invited residents to invest in the system? As a return on their investment in clean energy, residents would get a credit on their electric bill.

JACKIE JOHNSTON/THE ASSOCIATED PRESS FILE Gary Nystedt, Ellenburg’s resource manager, talks about the city’s new solar project. East of the Cascade Range, utilities are seeing potential in sunshine and enlisting residents’ help to buy solar panels.

Nystedt, resource manager for the city of Ellensburg — which owns the local electric and gas utilities — enlisted the support of his boss. The City Council in turn got behind the effort.

With help from the Bonneville Environmental Foundation and Washington State University’s Northwest Solar Center, Ellensburg launched in 2006 what is believed to be the first “community solar park” in the country, putting the already progressive municipal utility on the leading edge of getting power to the people.

Read on: http://www.thenewstribune.com/news/local/story/992122.html

The number of homes winning the government’s Energy Star designation since the program began in 1995 has crossed the 1 million mark. Despite an overall housing slump, 75,000 have been added so far this year for a total of 1,024,200.

Last year, Energy Star homes accounted for nearly 17% of all single-family homes built, up from 12% in 2007.

The Energy Star label means a house is at least 20% more energy-efficient than other new homes.

“They are better homes,” with more efficient windows, lighting, appliances, insulation, heating and cooling, says Maria Vargas of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Energy Star program.

Read on: http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/environment/2009-12-03-green-house-energy-star-new-homes_N.htm