For the last 20 years, Republican Senators have been held to single standard of climate denial by the fossil industry which sends them there. But Republican Governors were left alone.

Thus California’s Republican governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger has been synonymous with active support for clean energy. Likewise, Florida’s Republican Governor Charlie Crist who flouted Republican dogma with innovative clean energy policies, was a true independent – although, now as a Senate candidate, he’s had to run as one, literally.

But in what may be a harbinger of doom for state level climate and clean energy policies, it appears that the stupid has gotten into Republican Gubernatorial candidates now too.

Wonk Room is reporting that all 4 Republican candidates for Governor of New Mexico are in climate denial. They sound just like Republican Senators.

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If the Republican party does succeed in filibustering landmark climate legislation that Majority Leader Senator Reid brings to a vote this month, we will end the world as we have known it. This Earth will become what Bill McKibben calls Eaarth, a unknown new planet, with temperature and other changes never before experienced by humans. The last time the planet was that warm was millions of years before humans evolved.

What will that new world look like? Where will it be safer to pass down property to your grandchildren? Which regions will still have water? Google Earth has just come out with this new overlay to show how different regions will fare under the “business as usual” scenario.

The KML layer launched today by Climate change minister Greg Barker. The impact of a global temperature rise of 4C shows the effects of a 4 C rise (about 7 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of this century.

The 4C scenario will be the result with no action by the US  (Senate switchboard:  (202) 224 3121) because this November in Cancun, the rest of the the world will respond to that inaction.

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In encouraging news for species like ours faced with having to figure out how to survive the next centuries of unprecedentedly fast climate change, it appears that at least one evolutionary adaptation developed at breakneck speed.

Tibetans seem to have evolved their unique ability to breathe at high altitudes in thin air in under three thousand years, UC Berkeley researchers have found.

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Australian solar physicist John Cook of Skeptical Science has created a nifty little iPhone app that includes numerous climate skeptic arguments as well as the science-based counterarguments to those (since we are all tired of the misinformed myths about climate science but normally can’t cite scientific articles and data off the top of our head).

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Recovery Act stimulus funding for a technology that will make geothermal power available in every state is being invested in Senator Inhofe’s Oklahoma by the Department of Energy’s Geothermal Technologies Program, in a $3 million R&D program to increase the volume of hot rock from which heat can be extracted.

Solutions will be found to:
1. Reduce costs for drilling and well completion and
2. Increase the volume of hot rock from which heat can be extracted.

The Recovery Act stimulus funds is providing $2,399,999 to the Oklahoma project, and a company from out of state;  Impact Technologies will put up the other $600,000 of the funding, and a patent-pending system for drilling and completing micro-holes into deep 300°C geothermal reservoir rocks.

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The UK Climate Change Act, introduced in 2008, is now bearing fruit and thus providing the seeds for similar legislation in over a dozen other European countries.
Friends of the Earth and the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office have been hosting a series of seminars in European embassies lately in order to explain the benefits of [...]

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Clean energy is one of the top topics in the world these days, in presidential speeches, economic growth plans and projections, international competition and cooperation, and even in Hollywood. We have seen rapid growth in wind power, rooftop solar, innovative financing, and much more recently.
Here is my list of the Top 10 “Clean Energy” Topics [...]

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Hollywood, as a whole, is one of the most powerful entities (can I call it that?) in the world. Some of its biggest stars are getting involved in the politics of climate and clean energy now.
A great new video on the web featuring Leonardo DiCaprio, Felicity Huffman, Forest Whitaker, Ed Norton, Justin Long, and others [...]

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That takes my breath away. In one of the biggest renewable energy deals in the history of the world, a Korean consortium led by Samsung* has agreed to build 2,500 megawatts of wind and solar power capacity in the Canadian province of Ontario.

Samsung C&T and the Ontario government signed the deal on Thursday, January 21^st. The agreement will bring thousands of jobs and clean energy for more than half a million homes to Ontario.

Building off of this new deal, Korean trade officials plan to make Ontario their base of operations for all of North American.

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Business leaders from a diverse range of sectors and interests have called on Obama and Congress to make clean energy legislation a reality this year. Together, they have written a letter to Obama and Congress urging them to realize that we are very quickly being left behind by Asia, Europe and others on the technologies and jobs of the future.

The “We Can Lead” companies include eBay, Starbucks, Nike, Timberland, Hewlett-Packard, Gap Inc., Virgin America, Exelon, PG&E, and dozens of others.

Why are they behind climate and energy legislation? Among other reasons (i.e. we need it to address human-induced, super fast, catastrophic climate change), these businesses make the point that it would create 1.7 million new jobs in the US.

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