Washington Post: Despite the current boom in green power, renewable sources such as the sun and the wind still provide just a tiny fraction of the U.S. electricity supply. The rest is mainly fossil fuels: coal, gas, oil. To replace one with the other over the course of a decade, energy experts say, would make the Manhattan Project look like a science-fair volcano. And even if we wanted to try Gore's plan to make the US 100% dependent on renewable energy in under 10 years, his goal is likely to get more distant every year. That's because, even as Americans demand more action on climate change, their laptops and flat-screen TVs are demanding more electricity every year -- and they're not asking whether it's clean or dirty.

"This goal is so far outside the realm of possibility," said Richard Newell, a professor of environmental economics at Duke University. "It would be practically infeasible, politically impossible and economically and environmentally unwise."

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The Guardian: The British government will lose its leadership position on climate change and risk scuppering a global deal to cut emissions if it presses ahead with a new generation of dirty coal power, say leading US scientists and environmental leaders.

The heads of three influential groups, the Sierra Club, the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Natural Resources Defense Council, representing more than 2 million members, have written to the foreign secretary, David Miliband, warning that the UK proposals for up to eight new coal plants threatens the chance of the US joining a post-Kyoto international agreement to be agreed in 2009.

A recent report by the IPPR said the European Union's goal of reducing emissions from the power sector and heavy industry through its emissions trading scheme would collapse if the go-ahead were given to seven new coal plants in the UK and up to 75 across Europe./p>

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Nature News: Electricity generation provides 18,000 terawatt-hours of energy a year, around 40% of humanity's total energy use. In doing so it produces more than 10 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide every year, the largest sectoral contribution of humanity's fossil-fuel derived emissions. Yet there is a wide range of technologies — from solar and wind to nuclear and geothermal — that can generate electricity without net carbon emissions from fuel.

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Nature News: Electricity grids must cope with rising demand and complexity in a changing world. Emma Marris explores the intricacies involved in controlling the power supply.

The Industrial Physicist magazine wrote a similar piece in 2004, What's wrong with our electrical grid?

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Nature News: Can the Chinese government meet its ambitious targets on space, the environment, research, energy and health? David Cyranoski takes a look at China today and what it hopes to be tomorrow.

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ENN: The Alberta government is surging ahead on its climate change action plan with two new funds totalling $4 billion to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions equal to taking more than a million cars off the road each year. The province will create a $2-billion fund to advance carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects while a second $2-billion fund will propel energy-saving public transit in Alberta.

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Environmental News Network: Industrialized nations are failing to lead enough at U.N. climate talks in Bonn even as developing states are showing interest in a new global warming treaty, the U.N.'s top climate official said on Wednesday.

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New York Times: Plans by the Bush administration to develop clean coal technology, where carbon dioxide from coal-burning power plants is pumped back into the ground appear to be stalling despite support from President Bush, the three main presidential candidates, many other members of Congress, industry and environmentalists.

In January, the government canceled its support for what was supposed to be a showcase project, a plant at a carefully chosen site in Illinois where there was coal, access to the power grid, and soil underfoot that backers said could hold the carbon dioxide for eons.

Perhaps worse, in the last few months, utility projects in Florida, West Virginia, Ohio, Minnesota and Washington State that would have made it easier to capture carbon dioxide have all been canceled or thrown into regulatory limbo.

“It’s a total mess,” said Daniel M. Kammen, director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley.

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New York Times: Italy announced last Thursday that within five years it planned to resume building nuclear energy plants, two decades after a public referendum resoundingly banned nuclear power and deactivated all its reactors.

“By the end of this legislature, we will put down the foundation stone for the construction in our country of a group of new-generation nuclear plants,” said Claudio Scajola, minister of economic development. “An action plan to go back to nuclear power cannot be delayed anymore.”

The change is a striking sign of the times, reflecting growing concern in many European countries over the skyrocketing price of oil and energy security, and the warming effects of carbon emissions from fossil fuels. All have combined to make this once-scorned form of energy far more palatable.

“Italy has had the most dramatic, the most public turnaround, but the sentiments against nuclear are reversing very quickly all across Europe — Holland, Belgium, Sweden, Germany and more,” said Ian Hore-Lacey, spokesman for the World Nuclear Association, an industry group based in London.

The rehabilitation of nuclear power was underscored in January when John Hutton, the British business secretary, grouped it with “other low-carbon sources of energy” like biofuels. It was barely mentioned in the government action plan on energy three years earlier.

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Salon News: In 2007, some 20,000 megawatts of wind were installed globally, enough to power 6 million homes. Most wind power manufacturers are no longer American, thanks to decades of funding cuts by conservatives. Still, new wind is poised to be a bigger contributor to U.S. (and global) electricity generation than new nuclear power in the coming decades says a new report from the department of energy.

But while it is poised to happen, and other governments are working hard to claim market share, America will need a bold president to ensure leadership in this major job-creating industries of the 21st century says Joseph Romm.

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