Green Options

We’re coming at you live with special Red, Green, and Blue coverage from New York’s very own Wall Street Green Trading Summit.

If you missed this profile of the physicist Freeman Dyson in the New York Times, check it out now. Dyson, I would say, is the most highly respected scientist to publicly come out against Global Warming.

His point? There really isn’t a lot of proof of Global Warming beyond a series of simulations and models. If you don’t buy there prognosticating power, your left considering the fact that we don’t know, for sure, the exact ratio between temperature [...]

For all President Obama’s rhetoric of science being back in the White House spotlight, it sounds like much of America hasn’t quite gotten that message. A new poll from Gallup suggests that 41% of Americans think that the threat of Global Warming is exaggerated, the highest such number in a decade.

The Clean Coal discussion is not as simple as anyone (on either side of the propaganda machine) wants to make it out to be. To quote Bruce Niles from the Sierra Club: “Clean Coal means different things to different people.” If clean coal is what the coal industry wants, it’s already here. Environmental scientists agree that Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS) has some potential to make coal cleaner. But that nuance is lost in this discussion.

After years of railing against special interests, I find myself presented with a quandary. Special interests are lining up behind the Smart Grid technology I love and, in doing so, risk saddling this cool program with the baggage intrinsic to special interests.

In his interview segment last night, Steven Colbert talked to John Fetterman, the Mayor of Braddock, Pennsylvania. In between the usual Colbert shtick, Fetterman managed to make some interesting points about what the town of Braddock is trying to do in this era of green stimulus. His suggestion for how to bring back his town? Experimentation!

Can Green activists play the civil disobedience card… and still be taken seriously?

As we watch the dollars going to alternative energy and exciting new transportation options in the stimulus package, it’s always fascinating to see who will actually be on the receiving end of these huge checks. The answer to that question isn’t out yet, but a good way to guess who gets what piece of the pie might be at hand.