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Cellulosic ethanol, a car fuel made out of forest scraps and prairie grasses, is coming, but there still are a lot of hurdles to overcome, said Bruce Jamerson, CEO of Mascoma in an interview with News.com.

Although you may not be familiar with his name, Jamerson is a major figure in the ethanol world. Between 2003 and 2007, he served as president of VeraSun Energy, which makes corn ethanol. The company's stock shot up 29 percent on the first day of trading after its IPO in 2006, but then came back down to earth asrcorn prices rose.

As … Read more

Perpetual Water started with a ban on watering lawns.

In Australia, which is suffering through years of drought, a local government agency passed a law to make it illegal to water your lawn in the city of Canberra, said Ralph Petroff, a director for the company's U.S. operations. People began to just take their old bathwater out and dump it on their lawn.

In response, Perpetual Water essentially created devices that automated the process and cleaned the water at the same time. The water goes in, gets stripped of biologically active agents and solids, and then gets sent … Read more

Forget biodiesel. To put a dent in global warming, we are going to have to stop using coal, said Ed Mazria, founder of Architecture 2030 at the West Coast Green conference taking place in San Francisco this week.

"The only fossil fuel that can fuel global warming is coal. If you stop coal, you stop global warming. End of story," he said. Architecture 2030 is a non-profit that encourages builders, suppliers and architects to move toward making carbon neutral buildings by 2030.

The problem with coal is two fold: it spews a lot of carbon dioxide, among other … Read more

Amyris Biotechnologies, which is working on make jet fuels, gasoline and medicines through biologically inspired processes, has raised part of a $70 million funding round that it hopes to complete by the end of the year.

The company also said that it will try to come out with its bio-diesel, bio-gasoline and bio-jet fuels as early as 2010.

Amyris specializes in synthetic biology. It studies metabolic processes in bacteria and other microorganisms and then tries to replicate those processes artificially in labs. One of its first projects was developing a synthetic form of artemisinin, a medicine for malaria that grown … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--CORRECTION: Right now, if you buy an energy-efficient dishwasher, utilities like PG&E will give you a cash rebate.

They may do the same for energy-efficient PCs.

The Climate Savers Computing Initiative, a consortium of tech companies that is trying to get the industry and consumers to adopt energy-efficient components, has started to explore the idea of direct rebates with utilities, said Erik Teetzel, a program manager at Google during a meeting at the Intel Developer Forum taking place in San Francisco. Google and Intel are the driving forces behind Climate Savers. (correction: we spelled his name wrong. … Read more

Hubbard, Ohio-based NanoLogix, which specializes in industrial microbes, said today that it has coaxed microorganisms to create hydrogen, which in turn was used to generate electricity.

The hydrogen powered a 5.5-kilowatt generator. The generator powered multiple strings of 100-watt bulbs. Hydrogen doesn't power generators directly. Hydrogen is fed into a fuel cell, which strips away electrons that get ultimately fed into an electrical appliance.

The hydrogen is harvested from sugars in wastewater, according to the company. The company gets it from a Welch's jelly plant nearby in Erie, Pa. The process was devised in part by Harry … Read more

Some people make money trading contracts on foreign exchange. Dave Riker wants to make money by hedging bets on the weather.

Riker is the CEO of Storm Exchange, which is setting up a market that will let corporations analyze, and thereby insulate themselves from, changes in their businesses due to fluctuations in the weather. If you can come up with a way to estimate the impact or frequency of storms, banks, insurance companies, food processors and others can take corrective actions. The risk can then be alleviated by letting traders swap derivative contracts on how the economy might be impacted … Read more

DAVIS, Calif.--UPDATE: John Melo, CEO of alternative fuel (and medicine) maker Amyris Technologies, told an audience at the GoingGreen conference that when he worked at BP two years ago, he was part of a project to determine if hydrogen made sense as an auto fuel.

The answer was yes, decades from now.

"We determined that it would take 40 to 50 years to get hydrogen at scale," he said."It will be a reality. It will just be further out."

In the meantime, there will be a biofuel boom that will go for 20 to … Read more

Reporters on the front lines of climate change ate locally grown food from biodegradable tableware at the annual Society of Environmental Journalists conference held at Stanford University last week .

Yet, they also boarded gas-guzzling, air-conditioned buses to tour Google's solar headquarters, green buildings in San Francisco and area ecosystems. The nonprofit Environmental Defense handed out folders about safeguarding the oceans. These came inside vinyl shoulder bags that stank of the same toxic chemicals that poison waterways. Most of some 900 attendees flew to the event in petroleum-powered planes to discuss how to report about imperiled ecosystems, from the big … Read more