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One of my closest friends in the entire world is convinced Al Gore is full of it.

Like a lot of News.com readers who have reacted to the Nobel Prize announcement, he doesn't believe Gore deserves the award. I should add that my super-skeptical buddy--no names here or he'll come after me with a rolling pin--also dismisses the arguments seeking to prove the existence of global warming as warmed-over pseudo-science. He just doesn't believe the available evidence makes for a strong case.

Perhaps it's only circumstance that he hails from the computer industry. Then again, … Read more

I have mentioned my friend Justin Label, one of the partners at Bessemer Venture, before. Among other things he writes the Venture Again Blog. Bessemer is a highly respected old-line Silicon Valley venture capital firm. It has been an active investor in clean tech for a while, and is a backer of Miasole as well as SV Solar. I found myself on a plane recently with one his colleagues, Ted Lin. More than its investments, Lin was describing to me a new carbon friendly initiative that Bessemer itself is undertaking internally.

Its logic is simple, if it is investing in … Read more

"Without carbon capture and sequestration, we are all toast."

Jiang Lin, a scientist with the China Sustainable Energy Program with Lawrence Berkeley Lab, issued that gloomy proclamation earlier this week, and it's a fitting description of the current world situation when it comes to global warming. To make it worse, I asked Lin about how the world is responding to the challenge. Not well.

"We haven't invested in deep research or spent much money in testing out the scenarios," he said. "There are a lot of uncertainties."

Still, it's not over … Read more

Yahoo is purchasing offsets from wind turbines in India and investing in hydropower projects in Brazil, according to India news portal Sify.com.

Yahoo is planning to make up for the 250,000 metric tons of greenhouse gases it emitted last year, committing to become "carbon neutral" by the end of this year. That amount of greenhouse gases is roughly equivalent to driving 35,000 cars for a year or lighting the Las Vegas strip for two months, said Christine Page, director of climate and energy strategy at Yahoo. The company announced its plans Monday.

"We know … Read more

REDWOOD CITY, Calif.--How much conventional oil is there left in the ground? Close to 2 trillion barrels, according to Don Paul, Chevron's chief technology officer.

The "geological endowment" of conventional oil--that is, the amount of oil in the Earth--once totaled about 3 trillion barrels, he said during a presentation at the Dow Jones Alternative Energy Innovations conference here. We've used about 1.1 trillion. Oil companies with current technologies can't get it all out of the ground, so maybe there is a trillion barrels left for human consumption.

And we're consuming a lot … Read more

There's a lot of room between E10 and E85, says Alexander Karsner.

Karsner, the assistant secretary of energy efficiency and renewable energy at the Department of Energy, says that there needs to be a greater variety of gas-ethanol blends. E10 has only 10 percent ethanol, and in some states E10 contains only 2 percent to 3 percent ethanol, he said during a meeting with reporters at the Dow Jones Alternative Energy Innovations conference taking place in Redwood City, Calif.

On the other end of the spectrum there is E85. E85, however, is sold in only one-third of 1 percent … Read more

The goal of Tree-Nation is to plant 8 million trees in sub-Saharan Niger, Africa, the world's poorest nation.

The sunny Web site, based out of Barcelona, Spain, provides social networking for would-be huggers and planters of trees. You can donate between $14 to $106 per tree, and then track and map its growth via GPS and Google Maps.

Working with ecologists in Niger, Tree-Nation will nourish the sprouts of the baobabs, acacias and other species in a nursery before transplanting them outside. Although desertification threatens most of the land in Niger, the trees grow in places that receive enough … Read more

For someone who has a reputation for being boring and wooden, Al Gore certainly is polarizing.

Supporters assert that he has been one of the principal actors in bringing awareness to global warming and prompting governments and industry to take action against greenhouse emissions. While a lot of people became familiar with his work through the recent film "An Inconvenient Truth," Gore has been writing on the issue since the '80s.

Detractors, however, say he's an opportunist who exaggerates the scientific evidence and doesn't even follow his own advice. Witness the furor over reports that his … Read more

The average person has probably never heard of Miles electric cars. The fledgling Miles Automotive Group, originally based in Malibu and now located in a renovated building at the Santa Monica airport in Southern California, currently makes small, low-speed electric vehicles used primarily by universities, government and the military.

But as it gears up to launch its first freeway-speed consumer car, Miles is hoping to raise its profile by urging college students to create and upload their own videos about how electric cars can help clean up the environment. Miles will post the videos on YouTube and will award each … Read more