It’s starting to feel like a mad dash to the legislative finish line. With just days to go before the Thanksgiving holiday, my estimation earlier this week that Congress might wholesale the environmental integrity of the Energy Bill remains a possibility, but overall, as discussions continue behind closed doors, the fate of the bill is [...]

  Enter your zip code into the newly launched Carbon Monitoring for Action web site and you’re likely to uncover some information that will surprise you — there’s really a power plant that close to me spewing hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of carbon emissions into the atmosphere? Good to know. When it comes to [...]

  Enzymes are fragile — they don’t like things such as chemicals or heat. And as enzymes are increasingly being put to work in the cleantech world, stabilizing enzymes that can be used in renewable energy applications is becoming a valuable technology. St. Louis, Miss.-based Akermin, which is working on developing this enzyme-stabilizing technology, said this [...]

  Venture Vehicles Bruce in NYT: We got a ride with Venture Vehicle’s Ian Bruce a few weeks ago, so we can tell you the NYT’s description of “an Italian-made alligator-skin boot”-wearing Bruce driving his “three-wheel thrill machine” is spot on. Though, still cheesy as heck — NYT.Formula 1 Biofuel: The Brazilian oil company, Petrobras, announced [...]

  Looks like the $500 million Energy Biosciences Institute — a partnership between BP, and the research labs of UC Berkeley, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to work on bioenergy technology — is finally up and running. The group said Wednesday that the contract has been finalized and work is [...]

  Former VP Al Gore has gone all cleantech VC, so why can’t a presidential candidate use a cleantech venture fund as a platform for election? Illinois Senator Barack Obama said on Wednesday that, if elected, he would create a ‘Clean Technologies Deployment Venture Capital Fund’ backed by an annual $10 billion investment over five years. [...]

  J. Craig Venter says he expects biology to largely replace what has been created by the oil industry. If anyone can comfortably make a statement like that to a room full of venture capitalists, it’s Venter. The genomics guru, who has had his own genome sequenced and has a new memoir out he’s looking to [...]

  Scientists at the University of Virginia have announced the discovery of a new hydrogen storage material that could nearly double the capabilities of current storage technologies. If the material turns out to be something that can be commercialized, it could bring hydrogen storage tanks much closer to the size of gas tanks. The researchers plan [...]

  Gore NOT Donating VC Stock Options: From the AP, “The donation does not include stock options. Typically, a tiny fraction of a venture capitalist’s compensation is salary; the vast majority of wealth comes from sale of stock options when the companies the firm invests in are sold to the public.” — AP.Cash for Tree Cloning: [...]

  Biofuels, specifically corn-based ethanol, are being blamed for everything from rising food prices and famine to the degradation of land for biocrops (allowing Canada to breathe a sigh of relief). A lot of these critiques are spot on, but when complex politics are involved, it can be hard to see through the fog. Regardless, the [...]