Silicon Valley investors putting big bucks into clean-tech start-ups Silicon Valley's venture capitalists are seeing green in clean energy -- and we're talking gobs of profit, not the whole planet-saving thing. Investor interest in clean-energy tech firms has jumped in the past year, fueled in part by escalating global demand for electricity and the rising price of oil. This month, a consortium of moneybags put $20 million into Nanosolar, a solar energy company based in Palo Alto (gajillionaire Googlemeisters Sergey Brin and Larry Page were early investors). Other California energy innovators are raking in millions in investment funds as well. …

The Bush administration is championing natural gas as the answer to America's domestic energy needs, despite reservations from the usual batch of freedom-haters about its cost, reliability, and safety. Proponents point out that natural gas is cheaper, less polluting, and more abundant than oil -- and, oh yeah, a huge business opportunity. Major energy companies are pursuing over $100 billion in gas-production projects worldwide. But worries remain. Given the current hubbub over dependence on foreign sources of energy, it's notable that the big natural-gas reserves are in countries like Qatar, Yemen, Iran, and Russia. And communities being targeted for off-loading …

White House official who edited climate reports moves to Exxon Philip Cooney, the White House official (and former oil-industry lobbyist) recently outed for watering down government climate-change reports, has left his position in the Bush administration to take a new job at ... wait for it ... ExxonMobil. Now, we know what you're thinking, but you've got it all wrong. His sudden departure is "completely unrelated" to the controversy over his editing of research reports, said a White House spokesflack. His new job at Exxon, which the company declined to describe, is no doubt also completely unrelated to his willingness …

Lee Raymond, chairman and chief executive of Exxon Mobil, has decided that global warming is bunk and that his company is not going to waste time or money funding renewable energy. Openly and unapologetically, the world's No. 1 oil company disputes the notion that fossil fuels are the main cause of global warming. Along with the Bush administration, Exxon opposes the Kyoto accord and the very idea of capping global-warming emissions. Congress is debating an energy bill that may be amended to include a cap, but the administration and Exxon say the costs would be huge and the benefits uncertain. …

Forget the feds -- we'll make our own deals. The Oakland airport seems perfectly situated. Unlike many urban airports, which require an expensive taxi trip or hour-long train ride to reach the city where you thought you'd just arrived, downtown lies mere minutes away. Such convenience is possible because the runways sit on a former wetland at the edge of San Francisco Bay. But this prime location could prove costly. We're all intimately familiar with the basic global-warming scenario by now: greenhouse gases are warming the atmosphere, polar ice caps are melting, sea levels are rising -- and coastal cities …

BT and other multinationals call for action on climate change More and more prominent suits are issuing calls to action on global warming. The latest is Ben Verwaayen, chief exec of U.K. telecom company BT, who this week became the first Brit corporate bigwig to say publicly that climate change is hurting his business -- and, oh yeah, could destabilize the world economy. Summer flooding in Scotland last year, followed by gale force winds in the winter, led to "numerous cable faults, overhead cables down, and a whole car park full of vehicles ruined by floods," says Verwaayen, who fears …

Changes in fishing gear could save thousands of cetaceans a year Low-cost changes to commercial fishing gear could prevent the deaths of tens of thousands of whales, porpoises, and dolphins every year, according to the World Wildlife Fund. About 1,000 cetaceans drown every day after becoming entangled in fishing nets, primarily gillnets, which are hard for the animals to see or sense with their sonar. WWF says 10 porpoise and dolphin species will probably go extinct if nothing is changed. Dolphins -- revered the world over for their intelligence, complex behaviors, and irresistible cuteness -- are disappearing from waters off …

Bush admin proposes massive U.S. aquaculture expansion Just in time to celebrate World Oceans Day (happy WOD, by the way!), the Bush administration has unveiled a plan to open up 3.4 million square miles of U.S. coastal waters to aquaculture. Demand by hungry humans for seafood is expected to reach about 121 million tons in the next five years, even as wild ocean stocks decline; by 2030, most of that seafood will come from fish farms, the U.N. forecasts. The Bushies, smelling a market opportunity, hope to expand U.S. aquaculture from a $1 billion to a $5 billion industry and …

To feed energy demand, India gets friendly with old adversaries India's foreign policy, like that of most every major economic power, is increasingly driven by its need for oil. The globe's fifth-largest consumer economy, India already imports 70 percent of its oil, and energy demand is expected to nearly double from 2002 levels by 2030. So the country is pursuing arrangements once thought politically impossible with old South Asia adversaries, like a gas pipeline from Iran across Pakistan, and another from Myanmar across Bangladesh. It's also seeking deals with oil producers, soliciting, for instance, Saudi investment in its oil and …

Cold, hard, foreign cash. Lobbying has become as much a part of American culture as apple pie, blue jeans, and monster trucks, but it's not just U.S. companies playing the game. Increasingly, foreign corporations are spending big bucks to push their interests in Washington, D.C., many with the intent of weakening environmental protections -- from changing rules on the disposal of hazardous waste to opening more lands to mining and drilling to clearing the path for more nuclear-power development. From 1998 through 2004, total annual expenditures on lobbying the federal government nearly doubled, from $1.6 billion to an estimated $3 …