Mark svenvold

These days, everyone wants a piece of the rock -- domestic shale, that is. With oil-drilling costs north of $3.5 million per well and natural gas trading below $3, global energy companies are all about American shale. In November, Europe's second-largest supplier of natural gas, Norwegian-based StatOilHydro (STOHF), signed a $3.4 billion agreement in November to acquire 32.5% of Chesapeake Energy's (CHK) 32,000 shale-gas leases in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, New York, and Ohio.

At November's Carbon Economy summit in Washington, so many good proposals came up that I can hardly say which was best. So, here's a list of some that were truly outstanding

Will the federal government ever take more control of the nation's energy policy? At the Carbon Economy conference in Washington in mid-November, Duke Energy (DUK) CEO Jim Rogers stole the show when he broached that idea.

Today, each state has tremendous power to manage its own energy needs; governors and state public utility commissioners decide how much electricity is generated, from which sources -- renewable or traditional fossil-fuel -- and how much the electricity will cost. And renewable portfolio standards, which mandate that more electricity come from renewable-energy sources, have been entirely state-run initiatives.

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.

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:

Last Wednesday was New York Wind Energy Day. Like other recent officially designated days (New York International Fringe Festival Day, Hispanic Television Summit Day), Wind Energy Day coincided with a big conference: the Wind Power Finance & Investment Workshop, hosted by the American Wind Energy Association.

On MTV's 44-foot billboard at 45th and Broadway in Times Square stood a video screen showing wind turbines and industry factoids ("Wind power jobs grew by 70 percent from 50,000 to 85,000 jobs in 2008"). Nearby, at 42nd Street and Seventh Avenue, 16 45-foot cylindrical wind turbines were spinning away, powering the 47-foot Ricoh billboard: the first wind-powered outdoor board in the world. (It apparently saves the Japanese photocopier company as much as $15,000 a month on electricity bills.) And on the afternoon that the Dow closed above 10,000 for the first time in a year, AWEA president Denise Bode and Broadwind Energy CEO J. Cameron Drecoll rang the NASDAQ closing bell. That benchmark put an exclamation point on a day full of good omens and ceremonial gestures, and set a bullish tone for wind energy in the American portfolio.

Energy production and use in America could be adding as much as $120 billion in hidden costs to the nation, according to a report released Monday by the U.S. Department of the Treasury and the National Academy of Sciences.

The report, "Hidden costs of Energy: Unpriced Consequences of Energy Production and Use," ties much of the hidden costs to medical care sought by people affected by air pollution from electricity generation and vehicle transportation. Sustainability advocates say for the first time, the government has recognized and quantified what economists call the "external," life-cycle costs of, among other things, electricity generation, transportation, and building heating and cooling. Together these three areas account for 90 percent of the energy consumed in the United States.

Billionaire philanthropist George Soros has thrown his hat into the green-investment ring, pledging to spend $1 billion on clean energy. The 29th richest man in the world with a net worth of about $11 billion, Soros suggested he is interested in investing in technologies that are profitable and that are effective in reducing global climate change. "I want to apply rather stringent criteria to the investments," Soros said in a speech in Denmark on Saturday.

If he is true to his word, however, his investment would seem to rule out a technology into which he has already invested -- carbon capture and sequestration, which has been shown to be riotously expensive and dubiously effective, as in this recent post.

The U.S. has an appointment with history. The upcoming United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, slated for December, represents an opportunity for the U.S. to urge the world into taking serious action on climate change -- and reclaim America's leadership role in world affairs, a role that has taken a beating of late. Or the U.S. could retreat from that leadership opportunity, sink back into bickering over short-term domestic disputes, and continue what seems to be an ever-increasing slide into paper-tiger status.

That's the worry of former Irish prime minister John Bruton, now the European Union's ambassador to the U.S. Calling for action on New York radio station WNYC last week, Bruton called America's overconsumption of fossil fuels and dependence on unfriendly countries a national security issue. His remarks echoed those of Energy Secretary Steve Chu, who, when he was director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, urged the U.S. to take the long view on climate change and to take action:

The secret hero of Ronald Brownstein's article "The California Experiment" in the October Atlantic Monthly is Arthur H. Rosenfeld. A California Energy Commissioner, Rosenfeld is a winner of the Enrico Fermi Award -- the top scientific honor in the United States -- and a man widely recognized as an early champion of the of the powers of energy efficiency.

I met Rosenfeld a few years ago in his office in Sacramento. I found him to be a spry, silver-haired raconteur who wears short-sleeved shirts with a pocket protector and makes quick use of graphs and bar charts. Here's Rosenfeld in a video from CBS: