California is poised to enact the most far reaching carbon reduction plan in the country with a target of reducing carbon emission by 25% by 2020 which would be equivalent to rolling back to 1990 levels. This is essentially their ratification of the Kyoto guidelines ignored by the Federal government. It is a bipartisan effort (on the moderate side) which will be signed into law by the Governator.

Hopefully my state of NY will be next. We have agreed with several other Great Lakes states to restrict emissions from coal-fired plants. If the Bush people won’t pull their heads out of the sand on this issue then it will be up to local and state governments to take the lead. CA, as usual, is in the forefront.

We’re looking at replacing our roof in the next year. Due to changed local regulations, this will be a complete tear off and resheathing of the roof. I’m looking at Solar shingles but they’re pretty expensive and we’re not in an area with many sun days annually.
I’ve read about a company called NanoSolar that is building a factory in San Franscisco to build a new generation of solar panels that are far more efficient and much lower in cost. Maybe we can hold out until we see if they’re for real (they did recently raise $100 million in capital so it’s not a start-up).

In this Washington Post article, the Cass Sunstein makes a very persuasive case for why we won’t see China or the US do anything about climate change until its too late. Basically China will soon move from #2 producer of carbons (we’re #1) to #1 and they can’t slow their economic growth by taking away the fuel that’s powering it including dirty coal plants, cars with no emission standards and their huge population.
The US, on the other hand, has the highest per capita usage by a mile and our economy is totally dependent on oil to the point where we might revert to a very different kind of place if it weren’t available (think medieval villages). Disturbing stuff.

As you may have noticed I have various ads on the site. Recently ads for a Chevron site called willyoujoinus.com have been appearing on Burner Trouble. This Chevron site is allegedly a forum site to discuss energy issues. However the articles on it are ‘written’ by experts from organizations I’ve never heard of and the comments are very strange in that no one seems to ever really say anything.
Their section on global warming has one paragraph of text that says the many people think burning fossil fuels may have caused warming. Nice to see they have made a serious committment to opening up a discussion. Do I smell PR flacks at work?