Congress passes the emergency bailout plan, belatedly bundling in extensions of renewable energy tax credits.

A closer look at the details of funding for HR 7060, the solar tax credit bill currently stalled in the Senate.

This not-exactly economical solar table and a great instance of the Olympics using solar deserve mention, but cooler still is Oregon’s decision to use solar to help power a highway interchange.
OregonLive.com, which reported the story, states that “it represents a critical first step in what the department envisions as widespread use of solar energy.” [...]

In the same week, a report tells us we can achieve 10% of our energy from solar by 2025, and the Senate turns down the renewable energy tax credit. Again.

Government support for solar is seeing one of its standouts slide backwards, as Germany is cutting back on solar subsidies. This is obviously extremely disappointing, and while this isn’t entirely new news, the human end economic cost of the goverment’s change in policy is becoming much more apparent. Solar installers are having to deal with [...]

Yesterday, the U.N. and the World Blank announced plans for a task force to address skyrocketing food prices worldwide (Forbes.com).
The food price shock now roiling world markets is destabilizing governments, igniting street riots and threatening to send a new wave of hunger rippling through the world’s poorest nations. It is outpacing even the Soviet grain [...]

Hundreds of scientists at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency have reported political interference in their work, according to a report released on April 23 by the Union of Concerned Scientists. “Interference at the EPA: Science and Politics at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency” draws from the anonymous responses of 1,586 EPA scientists, 889 (56 percent) [...]

Facing increased roadblocks to financial success and growth stateside, the U.S. coal industry is taking its business elsewhere: overseas. Coal exports jumped from a little over 49 million short tons (mmst) in 2006 to 53 million in 2007, according to the National Mining Association, and the New York Times reports that coal executives predict exports [...]

Juliet Eilperin of the Washington Post observed that the March 3 report from the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) “arguing that recent climate change stems from natural causes” was developed by “23 authors from 15 nations, some of them not scientists.” The release of the report came in the middle of the 2008 [...]

Telegraph UK reports that the British government will soon reverse its existing policy and will move to solar feed-in tariffs. The upshot is that Britain consumers will now be in a far better position to pursue economically feasible solar installations for their homes.

This is fantastic news by any standard. This also appears to be the [...]