Natural gas overtakes solar and wind in clean energy race

Is fracking the clean energy future?

Several years ago, I was newly downsized from the newspaper industry that had been my life for the better part of the previous 25 years.

My options were hardly inspiring. My dad was slowly dying of Parkinson's and dementia, royally pissed off at the guy he considered his jailer -- me. The news business tanked. The jobs that remained had a bunch of us old veterans lining up. Salaries were 50 percent or less what we had made.

I had purchased a foreclosed house in terrible shape to rent and subsidize the cost of my father's care. On the positive side, it took six months to repair. I relearned a lot of construction skills.

Clean energy to the rescue

Then after seven months, I found another line of work. The American Reinvestment and Recovery Act was by then in full swing, and it covered my salary assisting cities and counties in California's San Joaquin Valley installing energy efficient lighting, cooling systems and even insulation. Not too sexy to be certain, but it offered insight into the entirely new realm of clean energy.

Clean energy at the time still had a lot of hurdles, but with federal stimulus money and constantly increasing costs for fossil fuels the holy grail of cost "parity" appeared attainable. A former co-worker and I started blogging about it, using news gathering talents honed over decades to debut the latest studies, technologies and breakthroughs.

Rio must bring out the best in clean energy

Protestors in Rio, courtesy 350.org.

World leaders will debate the merits of sustainable development and a green economy at Rio + 20, the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development to take place in Rio de Janeiro.

Protesters will use the event to highlight injustice.

And something substantive benefiting the environment may actually get done this week. This year's theme is after all "a green economy in the context of sustainable development poverty eradication and the institutional framework for sustainable development."

However, listening to current U.S. political discourse makes me wonder if anybody in government seriously considers steering toward a green economy.

Wall street bankers, brokers and speculators remain so fixated on profits and bizarre anti-populist goals like killing Dodd-Frank (read Matt Taibbi's "How Wall Street Killed Financial Reform" on rollingstone.com), the already weak-kneed consumer protection act, that real values get swept away like last quarter's balance sheet. The concepts of quality of life, a better place for children and continued proliferation of the American way -- where everyone has a chance to make it big -- get nothing but lip service.

A trillion reasons

Robert Redford put it succinctly in a piece on Huffington Post: "We can do better," he writes. His point is that with so much at stake, we need to shift some emphasis to clean energy and eliminate the near "one trillion dollars of subsidies ... handed out to help the fossil fuel industry" each year.