Plenty of discouraging news of political stagnation on energy and climate policy appears, to The Tracker, likely during the big Copenhagen IPCC conference in December as delegate try to hammer out a regime to replace the Kyoto Protocol. But two of the most seriously-taken news outlets in the U.S. offer a bit of comfort for those of us (me, me…) who stare in blank despair as global CO2 levels just keep marching higher. One piece goes to the top layer of government for a somewhat rosy big picture view, the other sifts through a worker-bee technical meeting and finds there a far more fine-grained reason for cheer. And as it happens each has a physics Nobel Prize winner who cut his teeth at Stanford University as a top source.

• NPR – Morning Edition – Steve Inskeep: Energy Secretary ‘Optimistic” but cautious; Inskeep doesn’t pretend to know much about technology, but asks sensible questions of Steve Chu. The main show is good, and the additional  mp3 links to longer excerpts of his remarks on coal sequestration and nuclear power are worth the time for a click.
• NYTimes – John Markoff: Pursuing a Battery So Electric Vehicles Can Go the Extra Miles ; I’ve heard about lithium-air batteries as, on paper, far cheaper and more efficient and energy dense and entirely good-sounding improvements over the lithium ion batteries now all the rage. Markoff attends a meeting near San Jose where researchers from IBM and elsewhere almost say they’re in the bag. Hmmmm. Maybe wind turbines and solar towers some day will be stuffed with batteries – buffering the weather and sunshine into steady, affordable energy sources? The story, by the way, is buried in today’s ScienceTimes. ”Twould be better had it gotten larger play in Business.

Charlie Petit

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