For a while hotels have been asking you to help them save the environment. A recent Westin I stayed at took this to a whole new level, and there were little cards around the room to help me understand how I was helping. Examples (my paraphrasing): “If you want to save the earth, hang up your towels and we won’t wash them” “If we don’t wash your linens the planet will be healthier, so you should leave this card on the bed” “This shower has a really cool two-head system, but we’ve turned one off to help conserve water” “If you can’t find any information about the hotel or its restaurants, its because we’ve put them on the TV in order to save the environment.

Greenpeace’s 2012 datacenter report came out. Some think it exposes the dark underbelly of on-line services, others think its another Mike Daisey-like hoax, designed to mislead the public. Overall it appears to me that the data is accurate, the results are unremarkable, some of the analysis is overly critical, and at least one point is actually over-generous to specific companies. Below are my thoughts, and a closing question: why are these companies under this scrutiny?

Yesterday I stopped in at the Breakthrough Institute offices in Oakland and had a lively discussion about energy innovation with Michael Shellenberger, Jesse Jenkins, Alex Trembath and Jessica Lovering. (FYI, I’m a Sr. Fellow at Breakthrough). Are We Driving Innovation? I’ve become deeply skeptical of DOE’s Loan Program Office, so I shared my current thoughts. We discussed the pros and cons of federal loans and loan guarantees for advancing key energy technologies, both in the theoretical abstract, and in the messier reality of DOE’s actual activities.

There’s been a lot of press about Apple’s major solar and fuel cell installation at its new data center in Malden, North Carolina. So far I haven’t seen direct statements from Apple staff - all of the data seems to be based on an Apple document titled “Facilities Report: 2012 Environmental Update”. Here are some of my thoughts on the project: I’m excited about this project and Apple’s leadership. The main thing clean energy companies need is customers, and this provides a boost to a couple of them.

The Solyndra bankruptcy has, not unexpectedly, resulted in a wide range of reactions. On one end we have “This was a horrible investment and waste of taxpayers’ money. We should shut down the whole program,” and on the other end “Every investment has risks, and if you want success on a big problem there will be some minor setbacks. This is totally healthy and expected.” I found myself having conflicting reactions, with my rational side understanding the portfolio perspective, my business instinct telling me that Solyndra was a really bad investment, and my energy innovation advocate persona saying “That money could have doubled or tripled the size of ARPA-E for this year!

Comet Lovejoy was only discovered in the last month. Given that its path got very near the Sun, everyone thought it would burn up. The following video tells the story (so far)….

Yesterday I again voiced my criticism of the “Light Bulb Bill”, which is now on hold. Today, I’ll lay out what I would propose the federal government should do. I’ll start by defining the problem we’re trying to solve, beginning with two things that aren’t a problem. First, I don’t believe there is an issue with motivation to innovate in the bulb manufacturers; they are now well aware of the potential to cut American’s electricity bills and split the savings with them, bringing billions in new revenue and potential profits to their industry.

I’m sure the saga isn’t over yet, but for the moment Congress has starved the EPA’s lightbulb efficiency efforts of the money they needed to carry out their planned program (I’ve written about it a number of times this year - start here for my thoughts). While most of the surrounding discussions have replayed the same arguments that have come from both sides over the last few years. Roger Pielke, Jr (fellow Breakthrough Institute Sr.

In 2008 I predicted that 2007 would prove to the be peak CO2 output for the USA (I termed it “peak carbon”). Checking in on the 2010 results published by the EPA we see that my predication has held up, but seeds of its possible undoing have been sown. The total US CO2 emissions rose over 2009 levels, but is still solidly below the CO2 emission levels in the years from 2003 through 2008.

Tim Bray’s recent blog post about maps and atlases totally resonated with my experiences at TouchTable, where we make the modern equivalent of map tables. Historically, map tables were the “professional upgrade” to atlases - you had drawers full of large-scale maps and a table big enough for a few people to stand around them. TouchTables are the modern version, using mapping applications from ESRI or Google instead of physical maps, and large format display tables instead of wooden surfaces.