If the Senate won't act, Obama can still do a lot, by Executive Order 13514

His action takes a little-noticed Executive Order by Bush a couple of years ago, the next logical step. With the Federal government the nation's very largest user of energy (and buyer of telephones and vehicles, and so on), this will create a market that will pull the manufacturers in.

President Obama Sets Greenhouse Gas Emissions Reduction Target for Federal Operations | The White House

Congress, without doing anything on its own, wants to block EPA

Both Sides Gird for Bruising Senate Debate Over EPA Amendment - NYTimes.com

And there's the North Dakota Democrat, Pomeroy, on the House side: http://bit.ly/7OB34j

Click this Moveon.org link to add your name to the petition to your Congressional representatives to stop this:

http://pol.moveon.org/cleanairactvote/o.pl?id=18533-9233186-7PpFVVx&t=3

The petition says: "Congress must not block the Clean Air Act's limits on global warming pollution."

"Meaningful" agreement in Copenhagen? I don't think so

The only value I see from the "agreement" -- that the countries should set a goal of limiting temperature rise to 2 degrees C., and tell each other how they're going to do it-- is that it reveals the pettiness, parochialism of all the big countries. Which we knew going in. A few million people (judging by the participation in various online and in-person protests) were hoping for a different discovery. Not today.

Green Metrics: Don't Get Lost in the um, Grass...

Andrew Winston, co-author of Green to Gold and the new Green Recovery, says in Harvard Business Review online that the typical detailed and multi-layered, multi-sourced effort to measure a company's or a product's carbon impact is tough and expensive, especially now. Not to worry! Get it directionally right, back-of-envelope close, and/or borrow from other industries' work and you'll at least know where to focus your efforts.

"Sustainable Energy -- without the hot air" -- Download free

Download the entire book free, or just high-resolution graphs and charts. As David MacKay writes, if you can add and subtract, you can grasp the real issues, and understand what has to be done: "Numbers, not adjectives." And tell all your friends, colleagues, opponents, skeptics, to visit this site, and just start reading: http://www.withouthotair.com

Finance renewable energy projects through property taxes

Santa Fe, New Mexico: This very liberal small city has embraced green goals, and introduced a green building code, but it's also the capital of a coal and oil producing state, so its main utility company has talked a bigger renewable game than it has delivered so far. (It's great to see the handful of solar panels along the main north-south highway between Albuquerque and Santa Fe, in front of the conventional power plant -- and a vane of a giant wind turbine lying alongside them--but it's also a symbol of the tokenism of the company.) PNM has challenged the legality of the city's attempts to contract with a 3rd party for solar power for city buildings, claiming that as a regulated utility, they, PNM, have a monopoly on power supply.

Now the county of Santa Fe has created a renewable energy district and any entity, home or business, can apply to become part of the district. This gives you the ability to pay back the solar or other renewable energy construction costs via a property tax surcharge, which stays with the building even after a sale. Funding from private sources will be sure to flood in, and the city and county should be able to keep it all going with bonds.

First good system for measuring sustainability progress -- sorry, universities only

The Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education, AASHE for short, has released its beta assessment tool - completely transparent, pretty easy to use, by the looks of it, and with 70 beta users already signed up. Check it out. How does it compare to industry metrics? (I