There’s a Bizarro World quality to this period in history. Anyone covering news in these Interesting Times cannot possibly chronicle all the news that really marks the journey as we careen into our unimaginably strange future. Add yours in comments, but here’s what I found:

California regulators decreed that, by law, your your car has to be cool. Also seaweed killed a horse on a French beach using just fumes and British engineers suggested that buildings be wrapped in slime to absorb CO2. A fossil fuel reduced our carbon emissions. British scientists taught agricultural runoff to clean up nuclear waste.

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John Rowe, Exelon CEO, said yesterday that climate change legislation is an urgent issue. At the same time, he announced that the nation’s largest utility would not be renewing its membership with the US Chamber of Commerce because of the Chamber of Commerce’s opposition to climate legislation.

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Blu Homes, a LIL favorite in the green prefab sector, announced today that they have purchased the assets of mkDesigns, the pioneering prefab company founded by architect Michelle Kaufmann that has been one of the most visible leaders in modular sustainable design. The plan is to bring some of mkDesigns’ leading models (Glidehouse TM, mkLotus TM, Sunset Breezehouse) to customers around the country via Blu’s proprietary manufacturing and building system innovations. This could be an intriguing combination, for mkDesigns and Blu were targeting different segments of the market and didn’t overlap much.

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China just awarded Bombardier Sifang a contract to build 80 “very high speed trains” for the country.

These are super progressive trains that are energy efficient as well as lightning fast. China intends to invest a total of $300 billion in high speed trains by 2020.

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Not every breakthrough in the solar industry comes from efficiency gains from esoteric new Silicon Valley start-ups (though these are being catapulted by the recent funding bonanza) and university labs.

Some come from understanding that half the cost of a solar installation is just the cost of getting boots up on your roof, like for any other roofing job. One block off the grid reduces that cost by aggregating homeowners into groups to go solar together.

Some breakthroughs come when utility-scale solar companies forge innovative partnerships with housing developers rather than keep on battling NIMBY transmission costs, as BrightSource just did to meet its contract with PG&E for RPS solar power.

Others are starting to happen as titans of industry like Dow Chemical gear up to develop the little extras that smooth the assembly line process to speed up production-lines.

Because in manufacturing, assembly-line efficiency determines production costs:

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MIT professor Daniel Nocera formed a company earlier this year to commercialize a new technology that can “split water” and store solar energy. The company’s key objective now: achieve a solar energy breakthrough.

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By 2011 the US Army’s Space & Missile Defense Command has plans to deploy a spy ship, which will be unmanned over Afghanistan. While this is a controversial move in itself, some eco-enthusiasts are applauding the consideration to model the aircraft after an experimental hybrid airship which took flight on a number of occasions in 2006.

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With the help of a high tech underground steam cleaning technology developed at UCal-Berkeley and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a creosote-soaked Superfund site in Visalia, California has been cleaned up more than 100 years ahead of schedule, saving millions of dollars and pointing the way toward a more efficient and sustainable means of dealing with polluted sites.

The site, which was just officially removed from the Superfund list, is known as Southern California Edison’s Pole Yard.  For 80 years utility poles were treated there with the wood preservatives creosote and pentacholorphenol.  By the 1970’s the site was saturated with contaminants up to 100 feet deep, and it won the dubious honor of making the original Superfund list when the program first started.  Almost miraculously, the Livermore cleanup has restored groundwater at the Pole Yard to drinking water quality.

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A team of researchers at MIT are engineering a strain of bacteria, which is similar to the type that causes tuberculosis, to produce biofuel.

The researchers say that the bacteria are useful because they are hungry for a number of sugars and toxic compounds and produce lipids that can be converted to biodiesel.

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What we call Cap and Trade, (and what China is now considering)  has already just been tried out in Europe, to meet Kyoto. They called theirs the EU Emissions Trading System. China will call theirs “Limit and Incentivize”. Regardless of whether we call it: capping or limiting emissions and trading or incentivizing to fund the switch to renewable energies - It worked.

In the first three-year phase; European carbon emissions dropped 300 million metric tons of carbon, according to a study by The German Marshall Fund; Ten Insights from Europe on the EU Emissions Trading System. US carbon emissions rose, during those three years from 2005 through 2007.

Here’s what we can learn from those who have gone ahead of us in forging Cap and Trade policy to reduce fossil energy use and increase renewable energies. The German Marshall Fund (remember The Marshall Plan?) has put together these ten tips from their experience.

The main takeaway? Don’t worry.

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