An international team of scientists had a warning last week: A massive amount of methane trapped in Antarctic ice could be released into the atmosphere.

Which probably prompted some energy companies to think: We gotta get our hands on that.

Gas hydrates are crystalline gas (often methane) molecules surrounded by a "cage" of water in a solid that resembles ice. As it melts, the gas is released. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, methane hydrates are stable compounds in water at a depth of greater than 300 feet.

Click to embiggen. (Image courtesy of USGS.)

At right is a map of methane hydrate deposits located off the coast of South Carolina. Right there, just off our coast, all that methane, ready to burn. But who is going to invest in figuring out how to tap into these reserves?

Your rich Uncle Sam, that's who. Late last month, the Department of Energy announced more than $5.5 million in investments granted primarily to universities for research into how the methane in these hydrates could be used.

Let's say I give you a million dollars. Cool, you'd say. Probably also: Thanks.

And now I say: You need to use that money to make a product. Say, baskets. You're all, OK, cool, I can make baskets. Good.

So you set up a system to make baskets. You invest that million dollars in a factory and some workers and so on (I have literally no idea what goes into basket-making -- wicker? straw? whatever) and start cranking out baskets. You decide to sell them for $100 a piece. You make 100 to start, and sell all 100 of them. Boom. You've got $10,000 in hand. Not bad.

But if Reuters is doing the math, you're losing $9,900 on every basket you sell. After all, the Reuters reporter would suggest, mansplaining away: You made 100 baskets but it cost you $1 million to make them. That's $10,000 a piece, from which you only earned back $100.

To which you would say: What, Reuters? What? Do you need a calculator, Reuters? Reuters! Come on, man! And so on and so on, forgetting completely about your basket business, letting your clothes fall into disrepair as you gnash your teeth and wail at the unforgiving sky.

Chevy Volt, as it says on the tin.

For sale: Gulf of Mexico oil fields.

Asking price: $5.6 billion.

Seller: British Petroleum.

Reason for selling: Need to raise money to pay huge fines levied after poking a hole in a Gulf of Mexico oil field and not closing it up for a few months.

Sorry, gang. This one is not for sale.

Photo by Shutterstock.

Back in April, President Obama signed the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act (the JOBS Act), and one of the most heralded elements was so-called crowdfunding. The law sought to solve a major problem: It’s hard to finance small-scale business ventures. Wall Street only cares about multi-million-dollar plays, and securities regulations make small-dollar projects rather difficult (and costly) to jointly fund.

The act could have big implications for community-based renewable energy projects.

Right now, there are two kinds of community-based renewable energy projects, the charitable or the persistent. Solar Mosaic, for example, was founded and funded on the concept that many environmentally motivated people would help finance local solar projects with zero-percent-interest loans. They succeeded in building several projects, but the model is constrained by the limited universe of people who have money at hand and are willing to let it be used for no reward.

The other kind of renewable energy project allows participants to get some kind of financial reward through sheer persistence, overcoming enormous regulatory and legal barriers to success (some of which I covered in this 2007 report). It means finding a complex legal structure to capture federal tax credits despite needing investors with “passive tax liability” or sacrificing federal incentives for simple ownership structures like cooperatives or municipal utilities. It means having “accredited” (rich) investors or only soliciting investors through personal relationships. This community wind project is an illustration, as are several solar projects in this report.

The JOBS Act may finally allow thousands of regular folks to make a modest return (5 to 10 percent) by investing in local renewable energy projects.

The minority viewpoint.

Eleven years after 9/11 -- if you can believe it has been that long -- the Chicago Council on Global Affairs decided to gauge how Americans' views on global security have evolved.

First and foremost, concern over global terrorism has dropped precipitously, with more significant declines evident among younger populations. But we're here to talk about the changing climate. How do Americans feel climate change ranks as an important foreign policy goal?

They don't.

Click to embiggen.

Only one-third of respondents listed climate change as a "very important" goal, down two percentage points from 2010. Worse, climate change was third-to-last, after "strengthening the United Nations." A February poll suggested that 61 percent of Americans think the U.N. is doing a "poor job," if that gives you any indication of the esteem in which it is held.

Larry Gibson, a key figure in the fight to stem mountaintop-removal mining, died of a heart attack Sunday on Kayford Mountain in Raleigh County, W.Va. Here's a clip about his activism from a 2007 documentary:

West Virginia's State Journal describes Gibson's impact:

"When it came time for him to walk through the coalfields [on a 1999 trip to raise awareness about MTR], people who had been walking with him were very understandably reluctant and everybody was trying to talk him into changing his route -- he absolutely refused," [said Dianne Bady of the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition]. "He was jeered, he was heckled, but he didn't give up and he made it, over 500 miles from one end of the state to the other. To me, remembering Larry, that is just so poignant because it speaks to the incredible courage and determination that this man had."

Mountaintop mining expanded over time to surround Gibson's family home. Bady thought of an incident in the early 2000s when Gibson watched as mining equipment ripped through a family cemetery, his best efforts unable to stop it.

His experience led to a push by [Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition] and others that resulted in legislation that increased protections for family cemeteries.

Photo by NESRI.

In 2007, Gibson was named an environmental hero by CNN.

"Hey buddy!" Like so many others, I always got this warm greeting from Larry Gibson, followed by a big hug. Like so many others, I saw mountaintop removal coal mining with my own eyes for the first time on Larry's mountain in southern West Virginia, Kayford Mountain, and I've been fighting to end the devastation ever since. Like so many others, I then took countless more people up to Kayford with me: reporters, national environmental leaders, film crews, students and many, many others. And to every person he took up Kayford Mountain, Larry would say that if he or she …

It can with your help; submit a comment to the FHFA by Thursday, Sept. 13! After effectively suspending residential PACE energy efficiency and renewable energy municipal financing programs in 2010 and then being taken to federal court and required to do a revised rule making, the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) released its revised ruling on PACE programs [pdf] earlier this summer. Did they repent from their 2010 assertion that PACE presented a risk to mortgage holders like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac? In short, no. The ruling states: The Enterprises shall immediately take such actions as are necessary to …

You gotta hand it to Charles G. Koch: The guy's got chutzpah.

Charles is the one on the left, not that it matters.

This morning, the Wall Street Journal ran an opinion piece from the infamous CEO of Koch Industries, the oil and gas (and many other things) giant that Forbes pegged as the second-largest private company in the world in 2010. The topic of the piece? The dangers of "crony capitalism," the again-in-vogue term used by the right to assail the president's efforts to subsidize anything that the right doesn't like. (He wrote something similar last year; here's Mother Jones' excellent takedown of that one.)

Let's see what the honorable Mr. Koch has to say today, shall we? Some selected excerpts.

Businesses have failed to make the case that government policy—not business greed—has caused many of our current problems. To understand the dreadful condition of our economy, look no further than mandates such as the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac "affordable housing" quotas, directives such as the Community Reinvestment Act, and the Federal Reserve's artificial, below-market interest-rate policy.

Far too many businesses have been all too eager to lobby for maintaining and increasing subsidies and mandates paid by taxpayers and consumers. This growing partnership between business and government is a destructive force, undermining not just our economy and our political system, but the very foundations of our culture.

Charles Koch hates hates hates subsidies.

Oil is washing up along the Gulf Coast in Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, churned up by Hurricane Isaac. After discovering hundreds of tar balls at Bon Secour National Wildlife Refuge in Alabama, a Greenpeace research team joined our allies at the Gulf Restoration Network to investigate the impacts on East and West Ship Island, off the coast of Mississippi. We found tar balls on East Ship Island and several heavily oiled areas on West Ship Island, which are both part of the Gulf National Seashore.

Oil and reeds washed up by Hurricane Isaac on West Ship Island, Miss., Sept. 4, 2012.

Meanwhile, the New Orleans Times-Picayune reports that Louisiana is “closing a 12-mile section of Gulf coastline from Caminada Pass to Pass Fourchon after Hurricane Isaac washed up large areas of oil and tar balls at the location of one of the worst inundations of BP oil during the Deepwater Horizon disaster of 2010 … agency crews surveying damage from Isaac discovered large sections of viscous oil and tar balls floating along the coast.”