Environmental Law

In The News (October 7)

By Dennis Pfaff and Kevin Livingston, Editors

• Solyndra, a California startup, emerges from "stealth mode" with $600 million in venture capital, $1.2 billion in customer contracts and a radically different approach to solar that involves skinny black tubes -- one that the company says results in much reduced installation costs, reports the San Francisco Chronicle.
• Meanwhile, academic researchers in Illinois may have come up with some other new ideas for solar technology, involving extremely thin cells that can be combined in flexible, even partially transparent, arrays, says this explainer from The New York Times.
• The financial crisis is a temporary setback in the hunt for solutions, even though evidence mounts daily that humans are to blame for climate change, says the head of the United Nations Climate Panel, as Reuters relates.
• But "Wall Street’s precipitous financial free fall" may claim as a victim national legislation to enact a sweeping program to control greenhouse gases, according to a veteran environmental journalist writing in Yale Environment 360.
• Such a program has been unveiled by House Democrats, although the proposal, in line with recommendations from a business group, doesn't go far enough to satisfy environmentalists; the plan would also block California's attempts to regulate greenhouse emissions from vehicles, the Wall Street Journal reports. 
• At the same time, a top California environmental regulator says economic turmoil won't stop investments that help the environment, but the focus will be on saving energy and money rather than massive change, according to a Reuters dispatch.
• Meanwhile, solar energy officials celebrated last week after Congress extended and expanded renewable energy tax credits but despite that not all is bright and sunny for the industry, given the credit crunch and some aspects of the new law, such as the fact that utilities can take advantage of the tax credits, according to the Wall Street Journal's Environmental Capital.
• EnergyMixx, a Swiss renewable power company, has tied up a $675 million project finance mandate with Deutsche Bank, intended to pay for the development of a hefty portfolio of solar and wind capacity in Italy, reports Clean Edge, from New Energy Finance.
• Climate change, hunting and habitat loss are combining to threaten one in four mammals with extinction, claims an international conservation organization, as reported by The New York Times.    

Full post as published by Climate Law Update on October 07, 2008 (boomark / email).