The NY Times’s business writers and editors are surely the world’s leaders on their beat in following energy and environmental matters as bricks, mortar, and money news. Their section’s “Energy Challenge” recurrent coverage is one example. Another today is “Business of Green: A Special Section.” It really is an entirely stand-alone section.

It is notable for two aspects. One, not so surprising, is its diverse reporting on such things as the nascent (some say, doomed to be stillborn) hydrogen-fuel business, methane from cow poop, and solar power. The other is that the hopeful news of a low-carbon industrial future gets a punch in the face right on the section’s first page (albeit below the fold). There’s always a sourpuss, and this one is the paper’s busy Matthew L. Wald.  He rounds up some quotes and, more important, telling statistics on why big bad coal is not getting clean, is not getting shunned, and could be a good investment if profit is one’s only motive. He actually provides a second jab at anybody’s dreams of an easy divorce from fossil carbon. Inside is his piece on the tall hurdles facing  nuclear energy, which some imagine rising from the ashes of the 80s and doing a clean job at what coal does so famously: crank out oodles of electricity night and day at a price that’s hard to beat.

It’s a good and calm section with news to delight any dreamer for a cleaner day but with reality checks thrown in. On that latter point, another story with nuance, worthy of highlight, is its solar energy report by Peter Maloney. Industrial scale solar farms, we learn, are running into stiff enviro opposition in the SoCal desert. On the bright side, the piece has a remarkable statistic. It says here that applications for large solar projects, if all bear fruit, could provide to the US the electrical output equal to about 70 large coal-fired power plants. Maybe that’s only during sunny noon-times, but in any case it’d be serious juice. One suspects the unit of merit here is roughly equivalent to 70 nukes, too.

The whole section is here.

 Related News: The NYT has a new blog, Green Inc., to follow these things.  That’s its logo up top.

-CP

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 24th, 2008 at 12:15 pm and is filed under Environment & Energy Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.