My friend has a Tesla Roadster. For those who are unfamiliar with Tesla Motors, the Roadster is the Ferrari of the electric-vehicle world, a high-performance two-seater with more sex appeal than Mae West. How ironic, then, that my friend pines for her old Honda Insight, a dinky little hybrid that has been a commercial failure but remains a cult favorite among the green car set. Why would any sane, hedonistic California resident wish their Ferrari were a Chevy Chevette?

Because the Insight had a wonderful feature that told her how efficiently she was driving. That feature was a light on her dash that glowed green when she was driving smoothly, braking gradually, and accelerating at a moderate piece. It glowed red when she drove like a bat out of hell, braked hard, and turned sharply. While driving her clunky little Insight, her focus was on how to make that light stay green.

Yet again the Golden State has set a de facto national environmental policy. It came this time when officials moved on Nov. 18 to ban sales of all big-screen TVs in California after 2010 if the sets don't meet state energy efficiency requirements. The ban has been brewing for several months now as the California Energy Commission (CEC) has debated a mandate that would require a 33% improvement in energy efficiency for all TVs sold starting Jan. 1, 2011, and a 50% improvement for sets sold starting Jan. 1, 2013.

These mandates would force off the market all current-generation plasma TVs with screens over 40 inches. LCD (liquid crystal display) sets tend to be more efficient, but many of the current models also wouldn't meet the new requirements. In short: Hasta la vista, Señor Plasma!

Consider the disposable diaper. It's part engineering marvel, a mechanism that takes one of the most foul side effects of parenthood and absorbs it into a small, manageable, plastic-wrapped package. But it's also part environmental catastrophe.

The average baby makes nearly 6,000 diapers dirty before becoming bathroom-trained. Waste watchers estimate that 27.4 billion disposable diapers are discarded each year in the U.S., adding as much as 3.4 million tons to dumps annually.

And that's not all. Each disposable diaper contains plastics and, in many cases, toxic chemical residues that show up in paper products, such as the chlorine used to make those diapers lily white.

President Barack Obama is trumpeting the stern criticism he gave the military generals who hold dominion over Burma, the resource-rich South Asian nation now known as Myanmar, at a meeting of Asian leaders on Sunday.

The Burmese junta is one of the most loathed regimes in the world -- a posse of paranoid, megalomaniacal cadres who kill, torture and repress their people with impunity. A throwback to the 20th century's failed Marxist revolutionary movements, the junta relies on Burma's vast resource wealth to maintain its grip on power.

And it is precisely that wealth -- which the generals capitalize on through bustling trade with China and India -- that allows them to ignore Obama's entreaties for reform.

NRG Energy (NRG) a $3 billion company with 24,000 megawatts of coal, natural gas, nuclear and solar power plants in its portfolio, has acquired Bluewater Wind, based in Hoboken, N.J., for cash on hand. The deal, announced in a press conference last Monday with Drew Murphy, NRG's Northeast regional president and Bluewater Wind President and CEO Peter Mandelstam, marks the end of a long, strange saga. The two companies, once rivals, engaged in a bitter competition to provide energy to Delaware. Now they will operate in conjunction under NRG's large, well-financed roof.

The background to the acquisition provides a study in the power that some investor-owned utilities have had to block the entrance of renewable energy into electricity markets -- and in how that is rapidly changing.

The oversupply problem plaguing the solar panel industry may be coming to a close. A glut of panels caused prices to plunge this year, calling into question the future of the industry, as well as the individual fortunes of manufacturers. An increase in demand from Germany is helping to consume the excess inventory on the market, according to a new report by research firm iSuppli, which should provide some support to the manufacturers.

Close to half of all solar panels manufactured this year will not be sold in 2009, iSuppli says, and it forecasts that the glut will continue until 2012. In August, the company pegged oversupply at 92% for 2009, but it recently revised the overage rate to 66%.

As the leaders of the world prepare for the critical Copenhagen climate and environment summit in December, Michael Woelk has a message he'd like them to hear. You can't fix what you can't measure. And it won't cost that much to measure carbon emissions down to the factory smokestack. For the entire U.S., Woelk believes a carbon measurement network can be built for $300 million in less than five years. To build a global system? Less than $5 billion.

Considering that the Administration's "Cash for Clunkers" program cost over $1 billion and will have very little impact on U.S. energy consumption or carbon emissions, Woelk's proposal would seem to be one that's nearly impossible to refuse. "It's a tiny amount of money, ridiculously small" says Woelk

Has this been a trying decade for the average American, or what? It's bad enough that we've have had to cope with stagnant wages and tax increases at just about every level. But in the months ahead, we may have to deal with yet another nightmare: surging gasoline prices.

Factors are lining up that could end up pushing gas prices back over $4 per gallon sometime next year. If you're already exasperated about prices at the pump, you're not the only one. Gasoline demand in 2009 has been comparatively low -- take 7.6 million Americans out of the workforce through layoffs -- yet gasoline's price has gone up, not down.

While the planet's environmental apocalypse may not be much much nigh than it was last month, this year's Election Day bore grim tidings for voters concerned with climate change. By electing public officials whose tendency on this issue is inaction, we may tipped the climate ever so slightly in the direction of the doomsday scenario -- a realm of irreversible ecological change that scientists have long warned about.

One battlefield was New Jersey, which elected Republican gubernatorial candidate Chris Christie, a U.S. attorney, over hapless Democratic incumbent Gov. Jon Corzine. Another was Virginia, which elected former state Attorney General Bob McDonnell over his Democratic challenger, Creigh Deeds. Christie vowed, if elected, to make trouble for the Environmental Protection Agency, while McDonnell revealed his own radical views denying climate change, despite overwhelming scientific evidence of its existence. McDonnell's denial of global warming also puts him at odds with the most prominent members of the Republican party, who acknowledge climate change as fact:

In the run-up to the big Copenhagen Climate Talks next week, the battle lines are already being drawn as the developed world and developing world square off over who should bear the burdens of slashing carbon output in order to halt the growth of greenhouse gases. Brazilian Finance Minister Guido Mantega flatly told the BBC on its Business Daily podcast that if the West wants Brazilian farmers to stop their deforestation of the Amazon Rainforest, the rich world will have to compensate his nation for its idled agricultural capacity.

The logic behind this argument is somewhat clear. Brazil and the other developing nations claim they are too poor to sacrifice local economic development to accommodate global needs. Further, the logic goes, the West and the developed world did most of the damage to the environment by pumping out greenhouse gases during two centuries of breakneck industrial growth. Now, the developing world says, the West needs to realize that it must pay for the lifestyle its hot-shower-taking, SUV-driving citizens consider to be their birthright.

Will the world soon run out of oil or are we swimming in the stuff? That debate just got a little murkier following a report in the Guardian newspaper that says figures detailing how much oil the world has on tap have been distorted in deference to the United States. The report quotes a current employee and a former staffer at the International Energy Agency, a policy adviser to 28 mostly industrialized nation that coordinates measures during oil-supply emergencies, among other tasks.

Despite forecasts that call for production to steadily rise by 2030, the world will likely instead see output decline, the U.K.-based newspaper reports, quoting an anonymous whistle-blower at the IEA. The senior official claims the U.S. has been influential in encouraging the watchdog agency to play down the rate of decline from existing oil fields while over emphasizing the chances of finding new reserves, the Guardian said.

On a recent trip down to Silicon Valley from San Francisco, I got a chance to sit down for an extended discussion with Brian Hinman. He is one of a growing number of A-list venture capitalists who have jumped the fence from IT into alternative energy and greentech ventures. Oak Investment Partners is one of the most venerable venture capital firms in the country, and Hinman is the firm's point man on greentech. He's the kind of guy that you have to listen to based on his track record -- co-founder of a two successful companies and a former CEO of a third. Hinman founded Picturetel, which was later acquired by telecom equipment company PolyCom (PLCM). Hinman then founded 2Wire, another telecom equipment company that ended up with revenues greater than $300 million.

So this is a guy with no Internet fluff in his pillow. Hinman is a hard-core engineer with 12 patents to his name. Hinman also loves to talk ideas about greentech innovations and sits on the boards of seven different Oak greentech portfolio companies. He has a fairly encyclopedic knowledge of the industry. Our talk ranged widely, so I've edited heavily. Here are some brief excerpts from our conversation:

As the federal government hands out billions of dollars to subsidize, push, prod and canoodle companies into jump-starting a green revolution in the U.S., one segment of the economy has been more or less left out. That would be farmers. The U.S. Department of Agriculture has gotten only a few tens of millions of dollars to underwrite grants and programs to promote rural alternative energy projects.

Still, acccording to the AP, the ranks of farmers who are producing their own power is increasing. But what's even more striking is how few now do so, considering the nature of their business and their access to precious energy commodities such as large acreage needed for solar panels and steady winds needed for wind-power generation. According to U.S. government figures collected in 2007, just over 1 percent of the 2 million U.S. farms are producing their own electricity, reported Cleantech.

Please pardon my poor punning, and let me explain: "Fraccing" (rhymes with "cracking") is the oil and natural gas industry's an informal contraction for the technology called hydraulic fracturing, in which water (and in some cases, a chemical mixture) is pumped deep underground to fracture shale and rock and thus free up trapped oil and gas deposits.

The financial media has been buzzing with stories proclaiming a new era for America's natural gas industry as new fraccing technology has enabled the tapping of vast dispersed fields in the Eastern U.S. and the "oil patch" states of Oklahoma and Texas. These advances have caused analysts to raise their estimates of America's natural gas reserves to an astounding 1.8 trillion cubic feet, the equivalent of about 320 billion barrels of oil -- far more than Saudi Arabia's proven reserves of around 260 billion barrels of oil.