The CEOs of Duke Energy and San Diego Gas & Electric say not enough is done to promote energy efficiency despites a lot of discussion between policy makers and the utility industry.

Lawmakers and utilities have talked a lot about how much they love energy efficiency measures – technologies and programs to encourage consumers to conserve, particularly during peak hours. But deploying them has been slow-moving.

(Via GreenTechGrid)

“It seems that all four bids are equally qualified to come in first — as well as last place — in the voting,” says Robert Livingstone, who runs GamesBids.com.

• Chicago 2016 Bid Losing Steam? (Chicagoist): “If Mayor Daley seems like he’s in a fouler mood than usual this week, it’s because the Chicago 2016 bid has hit some turbulence. The Olympics-related business site GameBids released its latest bid index rating yesterday (the first update since November) and it doesn’t bode well for Chicago. Not only has Chicago dropped to last place among the four finalists, it’s the only city’s whose index went …”(Via Yahoo Search: chicago 2016&ei=UTF-8&fl=0&x=wrt.)
• No Medal for Chicago’s 2016 Olympic Bid (NBC 5 Chicago): “Chicago’s bid for the 2016 Olympics ‘recorded the only BidIndex decline since the last update in November,’ according to GamesBids.com.”(Via Yahoo Search: chicago 2016&ei=UTF-8&fl=0&x=wrt.)
• Chicago falls to last place in 2016 Games ranking: Web site (Crain’s Chicago Business): “(Crain’s) — Chicago slipped into last place among the four cities competing for the 2016 Games in a ranking by the Web site GamesBids.com, which is run by a Toronto-based Olympic historian. Chicago’s score fell only slightly in a very tight race with Tokyo, Rio de Janeiro and Madrid. …” (Via Yahoo Search: chicago 2016&ei=UTF-8&fl=0&x=wrt.)
• Chicago’s Odds of Winning The 2016 Games (FOX News Chicago): “An independent Web site that ranks the prospects of cities winning Olympic bids says Chicago’s odds of winning the 2016 games are the worst of the four cities in the running.”(Via Yahoo Search: chicago 2016&ei=UTF-8&fl=0&x=wrt.)

(The comments at chicagobusiness are worth reading.)

Social Networks and Blogs Reached Largest Growth Among Top Online Activities – Nielsen’s Global Research: “

A new study released by Nielsen reports the shift in the online social behavior. Nielsen’s study results presented here followed the online activity in the USA, Brazil, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Switzerland and Australia. Note that the ‘Member Community’ category includes both social networking and blogging websites.

Social network and blogging sites are now the 4th most popular activity on the Internet (overcoming personal email) with 67% global reach as to December 2008. That is 5% more of what they attracted a year ago.

The strongest growth comes from Germany (much due to Facebook launching a German language interface in March 2008) now reaching 51% of Germans online compared to 39% a year ago (12% increase). Large growth has also occurred in the UK, Spain, Italy and Switzerland (about 10% growth in each country).
The US growth at this time was minor (2.6% growth) suggesting a saturation of the online social activity of the US population.

(Via trendsspotting blog.)

A study (.pdf 1MB) released on the eve of a national conference on green jobs says that emerging eco-friendly work must provide adequate pay and benefits — or risk damaging efforts to restore the economy and strive for environmental sustainability.

From the Executive Summary:

Until now, discussions of green jobs have largely assumed that these will be good, middle-class jobs. In this report we
test that assumption and \nd that it is not always valid.While advocates may aspire to make every green job a good
one, our examination of some existing workplaces in several environment-friendly sectors of the economy—
including manufacturing of components for wind and solar energy, green construction and recycling (waste management)—shows a wide
variation in labor conditions. Our research reveals significant challenges to achieving the dream of good green jobs,
but also many opportunities.

Selections from the table of contents: Labor and environmentalists Rnd common ground

VIDEO: Creating Jobs in a New Energy Economy

Cross-posted from WattHead - Energy News and Commentary

The simultaneous collapse of our economic and ecological systems has created a great opportunity to support industries that at once rebuild the market and the planet, according to an article by economist Robert Pollin, ‘Doing Recovery Right,’ appearing in the latest issue of The Nation.

(Via It’s Getting Hot In Here.)

In the RSS age, headlines are everything.

Earlier I called out Xerox’s PR team for feeding naysayers with what I see as a careless headline asking if green is a passing fancy. The message in these days of hyper-scanning translates as “green is a passing fancy” — not at all what Xerox or American business is saying.

Today, the West Virginia Gazette headspins $4.6B in the current the Senate’s HR1 as “Coal wins big in Senate stimulus package“. Good for West Virginians — or so they continue to think — even though the coal industry only employs 20k of them.

Instead, what seems to be happening with the coal industry and the stimulus package is more like a healthy dose of R&D money to further examine whether clean or cleaner coal is possible:

• $2 billion for “near-zero emissions” power plants designed to capture and sequester carbon dioxide.

• $1 billion for the Department of Energy’s Clean Coal Power Initiative.
• $1.6 billion for carbon capture at industrial plants

(US DoE Clean Coal Power page features this quote from incoming Energy Secretary Steven Chu: “Coal is an abundant resource in the world…It is imperative that we figure out a way to use coal as cleanly as possible.”)

Headspinning surely isn’t new (I’m flashing on Bernstein, Kane and the Inquirer) and writers and headline editors are ancient adversaries. But the bottomline is that “below the fold” is now below the <H1> and the days of burying one’s lead are obviously over.