What do you do when local opposition to an offshore wind farm project dries up, when the NIMBY crowd runs out of steam, when the federal government gives the green light and extends every permit and courtesy the law will allow, when the technology is tested and proven, and there’s nothing left to do but build it? Well, then you go looking for money -- lots of it. After more than a decade of preparation, the Massachusetts wind energy company Cape Wind has done just that -- and the results are looking promising.

A $2 billion agreement with Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ penned last week catapults Cape Wind to a commanding lead in the race to be the first offshore wind project in the U.S. When complete, 130 turbines in Nantucket Sound will generate 468 megawatts of electricity, enough to power 100,000 to 200,000 households in the Cape Cod region, depending on the season. If the company can get construction started this year, Cape Wind’s clean power could begin turning on lights from Buzzards Bay to Provincetown by 2015.

Want to know the real reason that rooftop solar panels haven’t spread across the United States yet? Slap a few panels on your roof some night and wait for the local code enforcer to notice them. Then count the citations as they roll in.

According to the U.S. Department of Energy, we’ve got the technology to power our lights with solar, but the red tape gets in the way. Regulatory hoops are holding up solar progress, says the agency (which is somewhat famous for its regulatory hoops), and making rooftop solar twice as expensive as it should be.

Now, to get us over the hump on solar power, DOE is offering a total of $10 million in prize money to the first teams of Americans that can figure out how to cut through the red tape and make solar installation cheaper on a sustainable basis. It might be the first time the government has offered such a fabulous reward for finding a way to get around the government.

Photo by A. Miller-Rushing.

Susan Peters, who moved from the East Coast to Tucson, Ariz., a couple of years ago, calls her adopted town an “oasis” -- never mind that it only gets 12.6 inches of rain each year on average. “I have a very green, beautiful yard with desert-adapted plants, not the East Coast kind of thing,” she says.

She especially likes her 35-year-old saguaro cactus -- the kind “you always see in Westerns,” she says. But if her cactus is ever going to land a starring role in the movies, it’s going to need to grow some arms, and Peters says that could take another 40 years. It’s also going to require water -- lots of it, and somehow it doesn’t look as if that’s in the cards. In recent decades, the Tucson area has suffered the grip of a combination of sustained drought and high temperatures possibly unrivaled since medieval times.

Almost as good as a parking lot: An artist's rendering of the completed river restoration in downtown Yonkers. (Image by City of Yonkers.)

For nearly 100 years, New York’s fourth largest city sat on top of a hidden river. The Saw Mill, or Nepperhan ("rapid little water," its original Native American name), rose and fell with the seasons beneath a crowded parking lot in downtown Yonkers. Tiny fish struggled to carry on the cycles of life in its darkened waters, even as a bustling city above wrestled its way through a whipsaw economy.

The river ran through the center of town, and had played a central role in its history -- as early as the 1600s, it inspired the mills and industries that powered the town’s expansion. But by the early 2000s, the Saw Mill had not been seen in downtown Yonkers in living memory. Then a few imaginative residents had the idea that if the city could bring new life to the river, the river could help sustain the city.

Sanitation workers handle drums of DDT at the Brookfield landfill in 1971. (Photo by Staten Island Advance.)

It’s a clear sunny Saturday afternoon in 1972 in the idyllic suburban neighborhood of Great Kills, on New York City’s Staten Island. You’re just pulling the AMC Ambassador station wagon out of the Brookfield landfill after dropping off a couple of trash bags full of lawn clippings. You’ll stop off next door at the bakery for some cupcakes for the kids and be back in the carport in two and a half minutes, just in time to catch the Mets game over the radio out by the grill. It’ll be a good day as long as the wind keeps blowing the right direction.

Such was life near Brookfield, a landfill that was an eyesore and bane of the community for decades. But after 40 years with this unwelcome neighbor, Great Kills residents learned at a December meeting that they are finally about to have their say over what goes into the 132-acre former dump at the end of the block. An evolving spirit of partnership has begun transforming the site into a major New York City park, perhaps unique in the nation.

John McLaughlin, the ecologist managing the restoration for the New York City Department of Environmental Protection, says that when completed, it will be one of the largest chunks of natural landscape in the city, and the first landfill in the United States to be converted into an “ecologically functional wetland park.”