The catastrophe unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico has been portrayed as a one-of-a-kind disaster, a perfect storm of bad equipment, bad planning and bad luck.

But it’s far from the only spill that’s taken place this year – or even the only spill occurring in the Gulf right now.

On June 7, the Mobile Press-Register reported that the Ocean Saratoga rig has been leaking into the Gulf since April 30. Interior Department spokeswoman Kendra Barkoff confirmed the next day that “small amounts of oil” were leaking from the wells beneath the rig, about 10 miles from Louisiana’s southeastern coast. (more…)

For years, free-market fundamentalists opposed to government regulation have sought to create doubt in the public’s mind about the dangers of smoking, acid rain, and ozone depletion. Now they have turned those same tactics on the issue of global warming and on climate scientists, with significant success.

In recent months, a group called the Cooler Heads Coalition — a creation of the Washington-based Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) — has fostered a public image of climate science as a criminal conspiracy. The CEI itself has accused NASA, the largest funder of climate science, of faking important climate data sets. In February, U.S. Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma, whose positions are frequently cited and promoted by CEI, called for a criminal investigation of 17 climate scientists from a variety of institutions for allegedly falsifying or distorting data used in taxpayer-funded research. (more…)

(Reuters) – President Barack Obama will press BP executives this week to set up an escrow account to pay damage claims by individuals and businesses hurt by the Gulf of Mexico oil spill disaster.

The move comes as Obama, who will address the nation about the spill on Tuesday night, faces questions on his handling of the disaster, which was in its 55th day. Millions of gallons of oil have poured into the Gulf since an April 20 offshore rig blast killed 11 workers and blew out the well. (more…)

With the clock ticking down on the legislative calendar, lawmakers on Capitol Hill are jockeying to get an energy bill onto the stage that will find the required votes for passage. The goals couldn’t be more clear: enact policy that will save energy, curb greenhouse gas emissions and encourage the production of green alternatives that will reduce the country’s dependence on foreign oil. In the wake of the national catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico, one might think that characteristic partisan interests and knee-jerk procedural bickering might be put aside in favor of compelling national unity. Yet the legislative waters on the issue remain, for now, murky as usual.

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No, says a new report from the Global Justice Ecology Project, the Global Forest Coalition and Biofuelwatch called “Wood-based Bioenergy: The Green Lie”.

Burning wood – even fast-growing, genetically engineered trees designed to be used for fuel – merely increases the dangers of climate change, especially among the poorest nations, where much of the tree-growing takes place.

Growers argue that the tree plantations are growing on “marginal” land, but there is no such thing as marginal land in a poor country like Borneo, for example, where such land is used for grazing livestock, gathering wild plants for food or medicine, or as housing space.

Even the argument itself is specious. Some of these monoculture plantations are encroaching on arable land, or invading old-growth forests, a process that ends up displacing indigenous forest people (more…)

Trade fairs – even those presenting green technology – are not exactly known to be environmentally friendly. Every trade fair causes a variety of emissions starting with the production of trade fair stands, transport and other logistics and a lot of waste during and after the fair when a large quantity of material, including the major part of a fair stand are simply thrown away. Photovoltaic manufacturer, Yingli Green Energy was looking for a way to ‘green’ its event and trade fair material (more…)

In a bold new risk publication out today from Lloyd’s of London, entitled Sustainable Energy Security: Strategic Risks and Opportunities for Business, the insurance heavyweight states in no uncertain terms that businesses that fail to prepare for short and long term energy crises face potentially catastrophic risks:

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The EPA may experiment with using containment booms made out of mushrooms to break down oil gushing from the Gulf, according to a leading mushroom scientist.

Paul Stamets, a pioneering mycologist, said he had been contacted “at the highest levels of the EPA” to discuss using long, floating cylinders of fungi to break down hydrocarbons floating in the Gulf from the BP oil disaster.

Stamets has experimented with a species of oyster mushroom, pleurotus ostreatus, that can withstand saltwater and establish itself on straw. Applied to diesel-contaminated soil, it cut the dirt’s oil content from 10,000 parts per million to 200 parts per million within 16 weeks. (more…)

In the wake of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, 71 percent of Americans say President Obama and Congress should make developing clean sources of energy a high priority, an 11 percent increase since January, according to a new poll. The poll, conducted by Yale University and George Mason University, also revealed that 77 percent of Americans support regulating carbon dioxide as a pollutant.

On Thursday, the U.S. Senate will vote on a resolution by Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) that would block (more…)

Though Smart Water offers equal or potentially greater benefits than Smart Energy, Smart Water isn’t getting equal coverage.

It’s been a great year for the Smart Grid. Entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, analysts, journalists, and regulators can’t stop talking about it. Experts are competing to project greater market potential. Zpryme puts the Smart Appliance market alone at $15.2 billion by 2015, Lux Research talks about $15.8 billion, Cisco estimates the overall opportunity at $100 billion and Pike research uses a whopping $200 billion figure. (more…)