Emma Ritch's blog

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has vocally opposed the climate-change legislation that's now making its way through Congress.

The continued denial recently prompted Apple, Exelon, and PG&E to jump ship from the business lobby that claims to represent more than 3 million companies. But for a few minutes yesterday, it appeared that the chamber had given into pressure and reversed its opinion.

The cleantech industry has a new anthem… if we want it. 

A group calling itself DCFreeBand posted a video on YouTube in mid-July that's been racking up hits in recent days. The track, "Clean Energy Song," sings the praises of wind, solar and natural gas powered-vehicles—proclaiming in the opening credits that it was written "In Support Of The T. Boone Picken's [sic] Plan."

Vinod Khosla just might have let it slip which of his cleantech investments he thinks has the best chance at success.

When asked to pick the top company in the cleantech portfolio of Khosla Ventures, the firm's founder told the audience at the Always On Going Green Conference in Sausalito, Calif., that he couldn't choose (see Kleiner Perkins hints at plug-in car launch this week).

The European Union enacted its ban today on incandescent light bulbs, allowing shops to sell their current supply but not buy or import more of them.

The switch to compact fluorescent light bulbs and LEDs is expected to reduce the electricity used for lighting and help the region reduce its greenhouse-gas emissions, but the move is prompting vocal opposition from artists, parents, health advocates and even environmentalists.

The United States should take note, as its phasing-out of incandescents begins in 2012 (see Vu1 raises $5M for lighting tech).

Cleantech's most litigious startup Tesla Motors is likely celebrating today, after reports surfaced that a judge dismissed a lawsuit brought by the company's former CEO.

Two new reports this week gave urgency to efforts to reduce water use in India's agriculture sector.

First, the Indian government's State of the Environment report warned: "Groundwater reserves are becoming more and more depleted even as surface water sources become too polluted for human use."

That was followed by a study in the journal Nature that presented unnerving data on groundwater depletion in India, as viewed by satellites orbiting the Earth as part of NASA's Gravity Recovery And Climate Experiment. The satellites showed that the water table in India is falling 1.6 inches per year, losing 109 cubic kilometers (88.4 million acre-feet) from August 2002 to October 2008.

Some of cleantech's most famous names are weighing in on U.S. lawmaker Chris Van Hollen's proposal for a bank with the sole purpose of financing cleantech projects in the United States.

The ringing endorsements? "Imaginative" and "creative," according to an e-mail Van Hollen's office sent out today.

Another imaginative, creative bank

A new study from software developer McAfee this week could put new pressure on lawmakers to do something about the spam problem.

This spam is definitely not the problem.

It turns out that unwanted e-mail messages are not only annoying; the writing, routing and deleting of spam uses about 33 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity each year. That equates to the electricity used by 2.1 million U.S. homes.

Mountain View, Calif.-based Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) has finally admitted there is validity to the long-standing rumors of a dedicated venture capital arm at the Internet giant.

Google has officially launched the VC fund, Google Ventures, with about $100 million to invest in technology startups in in software, cleantech, biotech, health care and the Web.

A U.S. lawmaker from Maryland today took the first step to create a bank with the sole purpose of financing cleantech projects in the United States.

Democratic Rep. Chris Van Hollen introduced the Green Bank Act of 2009, which would create a bank initially capitalized with $10 billion funded through the sale of bonds. The tax-exempt government-owned bank would then be able to offer financing to clean energy and energy efficiency projects within the country's borders.

The name GreenBank is already taken by a commercial bank in Tennessee with roots dating back to 1890.