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President Bush once remarked at a White House party that in the famously liberal enclave of San Francisco, his supporters were so rare that "you could probably fit them all in one room." He wasn't exaggerating, and he would do little to alter his standing. He never once set foot in San Francisco during his two terms, and he was hardly much chummier with California as a whole, the nation's most populous state and the world's eighth-largest economy.

After the Economic Stimulus Act in early 2008 (which gave us shopping money) and the huge bank bailout later in the year failed to turn around a tanking economy, attention has turned to another massive stimulus bill—one that would fix the nation’s crumbling roads and bridges. At first glance, it sounds good. Public works programs, as we saw in the 1930s when hundreds of thousands of workers were employed by the Works Progress Administration (WPA), can play a huge role in putting people to work and boosting the economy. A public works program focused on infrastructure could do the same thing.

FOR centuries, grist-grinders and sailors have exploited the wind. Now, New York developers, homeowners and city leaders might be coming around. A handful of buildings are already drawing electricity from wind turbines, which typically resemble table fans, or mounted airplane propellers.

Carbon emissions are increasingly at the forefront of policy issues, and experts say agricultural practices could play a role in decreasing emissions while providing farmers with a new cash crop. "You can't go to a newsstand today without seeing major publications with sustainability, climate change or energy on the cover," said Jim Mulhern, a founding partner of Watson/Mulhern and veteran policy strategist and communicator with 20 years experience in Washington public policy issues.

Governments could slow global warming dramatically, and buy time to avert disastrous climate change, by slashing emissions of one of humanity's most familiar pollutants soot according to NASA scientists. A study by the space agency shows that cutting down on the pollutant can have an immediate cooling effect and prevent hundreds of thousands of deaths from air pollution at the same time.

The United States will fall well short of biofuels mandates on the uncertain development of next-generation fuels made from grasses and wood chips, the government's top energy forecasting agency said on Wednesday. "The key risk factor is rate of development of cellulosic biofuels technology," Howard Gruenspecht, the Energy Information Administration's acting head, said at press conference in Washington introducing the agency's annual energy forecast. "Near term growth of cellulosic ... is certainly a question mark."

"Please erase your image of electric cars being like golf carts," a spokesman for Japan's fourth-biggest automaker said before taking a zero-emission vehicle out for a spin. As mass-produced electric cars come closer to reality, their makers are trying to polish the image of what experts say could be a hard sell in the current recession.

A pair of Washington lawyers is hoping to brand a new kind of corporate executive: the CCO, or chief climate officer. A small but growing number of companies have been jumping on the climate bandwagon in recent years, trying to figure out how to make their products and processes greener. The trend has caught on in various industries, from apparel to technology to foodstuffs, and many companies have turned their strategies over to an in-house climate czar.

A sustainable global food system in the 21st Century needs to be built on a series of "new fundamentals", according to a leading food expert. Tim Lang warned that the current system, designed in the 1940s, was showing "structural failures", such as "astronomic" environmental costs. The new approach needed to address key fundamentals like biodiversity, energy, water and urbanisation, he added.

The burning of fossil fuels - notably coal, oil and gas - has accounted for about 80 percent of the rise of atmospheric carbon dioxide since the pre-industrial era. Now, NASA researchers have identified feasible emission scenarios that could keep carbon dioxide below levels that some scientists have called dangerous for climate. When and how global oil production will peak has been debated, making it difficult to anticipate emissions from the burning of fuel and to precisely estimate its impact on climate. To better understand how emissions might change in the future, Pushker Kharecha and James Hansen of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York considered a wide range of fossil fuel consumption scenarios

The Interior Department announced a controversial decision late Wednesday to double the rate of logging on 2.6 million acres of federally owned forests in southwestern Oregon. In doing so, it brushed aside the objections of the governor and two federal agencies charged with guarding the quality of the area’s water and the health of the fish that depend on it. The decision, which was posted on the Web sites of the Bureau of Land Management’s Oregon offices, has revived the battle lines formed during the fight over the extensive logging of old-growth timber in the 1980s, a practice blamed for the rapid decline in populations of the northern spotted owl.

More than 2 trillion tons of land ice in Greenland, Antarctica and Alaska have melted since 2003, according to new NASA satellite data that show the latest signs of what scientists say is global warming. More than half of the loss of landlocked ice in the past five years has occurred in Greenland, based on measurements of ice weight by NASA's GRACE satellite, said NASA geophysicist Scott Luthcke. The water melting from Greenland in the past five years would fill up about 11 Chesapeake Bays, he said, and the Greenland melt seems to be accelerating.

It's not surprising that the pages of Joel Makower's latest book, Strategies for the Green Economy, are printed on paper made from 100% post-consumer, de-inked fiber. That's paper that has been used by consumers and collected through various recycling programs. Makower, editor of GreenBiz.com, practices what he preaches. He's spent the last 20 years advising companies on green strategies and marketing, and has written books such as The Green Consumer and The E-Factor: The Bottom Line Approach to Environmentally Responsible Business.

An environmental advocacy group’s tests of river water and ash near the site of a huge coal ash spill in East Tennessee showed levels of arsenic, lead, chromium and other metals at 2 to 300 times higher than drinking water standards, the group said Thursday.

Scientists fear the already declining growth rate of the Great Barrier Reef's corals will stop completely by 2050, killing off the reef and making way for algae. A new report shows the most robust corals on the reef have slowed in growth by more than 14 per cent since the "tipping point" in 1990.

A coal ash spill that blanketed residential neighborhoods and contaminated nearby rivers in Roane County, Tenn., earlier this week is more than three times larger than initially estimated, the Tennessee Valley Authoritysaid. Coal ash, a byproduct of burning coal, contains toxic heavy metals like arsenic, lead, and selenium that can cause cancer and neurological problems.

THE rate of land clearing is much higher than Australia's environmental accounting methods may suggest, a study by researchers at the University of Queensland shows. It says traditional bookkeeping methods are misleading because they usually record positive and negative environmental outcomes separately, and that lack of context means big net losses of forested land can be wrongly reported as a win for conservation.

COLUMBIA, Mo. (AP) — A federal conservation program originally designed to help small farmers is now disproportionately benefiting industrial livestock operations, according to a new report by a family farm advocacy group. The Campaign for Family Farms and the Environment examined five years worth of payments through the federal Environmental Quality Incentives Program, known as EQIP.

Eastern DRC – Mountain gorillas in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) have been seen by park rangers for the first time since the rangers were forced out of areas of Virunga National Park by Laurent Nkunda’s army 15 months ago. Virunga National Park director, Emmanuel de Merode, successfully negotiated with Nkunda and got confirmation that Institut Congolais pour la Conservation de la Nature (ICCN) would be allowed to reenter and work in the southern part of the park.

Grounding planes after the 11 September attacks may not have caused unusual temperature effects. When all commercial air traffic in the United States was grounded after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, scientists got an unexpected opportunity to test ideas about the climate effects of the condensation trails left behind by jets.