This past weekend in New York, a group of high tech companies, venture investors, hackers, college students and observers like me held the second Cleanweb Hackathon on the NYU campus. For those not familiar with a hackathon, it is a gathering where software developers and serial entrepreneurs, fueled by coffee...

This past weekend, I attended the Aspen Institute's Clean Energy Roundtable, an annual gathering of business, political and policy leaders working in clean energy. Inspired by the many insights and ideas presented, here are my thoughts on the state of clean energy today and what lies ahead.

First the...

The OPEC cartel that meets in Vienna today has thrived in its 50-year history. First ignored, then despised for using the "oil weapon" on the West, and ultimately granted a strange legitimacy due to age, it has assumed all the trappings of an international organization. This week's meeting of Mahmoud...

There are many reasons that John Bryson, nominated by President Obama yesterday to be the next Secretary of Commerce, is an ideal pick for the job. Bryson, as many news outlets have reported, is a highly successful CEO who, sitting on the boards of companies like Boeing and Disney, understands...

In the wake of the successful mission to kill Osama Bin Laden and end his career of terror, much attention has focused on possible reprisals by the Al Qaeda organization. Will his followers attempt an attack here? In Israel? Or perhaps in Asia, Africa or the developing world. These are...

Between President Obama's Energy speech at Andrews Airforce Base at the end of March, 2010 and his speech yesterday at Georgetown, much has changed in energy. Unfortunately, with the exception of the promise of fracked gas, it has not been for the better.

A year ago, there was a real...

There are times when news is light. There are times when it is off the charts. Over the last few weeks, we have seen populist uprisings sweep the Middle East and China, an earthquake and tsunami level Japan, multiple nuclear meltdowns and over the last few days, the entrance of...

The earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan on Friday is a disaster from which Japan may need years to recover. It is a disaster, however, from which the Japanese and by extension world nuclear industry may never recover. The meltdowns at up to six reactors that the Japanese are now...

As the clean energy standard idea proposed by President Obama in his State of the Union address works its way through Congress, another CES is also generating buzz in the clean energy world. Its full name: community electricity storage.

CES -- the storage variety -- is about placing storage at...

Over the last few decades, the field of economics has made important strides in understanding economic growth. The secret sauce in the new growth theory is something called increasing returns. They are not not supposed to occur in classical economics and don't occur in classic models of the broad economy....

The vision President Obama laid out in his State of the Union -- future forward and focused on winning the clean energy race through innovation, freeing business to compete and investing in research and education -- was spot on. So was the parallel he drew to Sputnik. For the United...

Since the Transportation Security Agency began deep searches of airline passengers, a firestorm of protest has broken out. YouTube videos and news reports have shown TSA agents in the unseemly role of asking pilots--who control the fate of planes and may carry arms--to submit to x-rated searches, women, from teenage...

Republicans and Democratics draft a bill to solve the single most pressing issue of the day. Working closely and amically they speed it to the the President's desk, he signs it and the bill becomes law. Amidst the rancor over health care legislation, this might seem like an echo of...

When the UN awarded the Nobel prize to the scientists who make up the IPCC and Al Gore in 2008 for their work in documenting climate change from greenhouse gases, in the eyes of most of the world, the science on this issue was solved. In recent months, however, a...

A new wave of pessimism seems to be washing over the economy. Its source is hard to pinpoint but there is no shortage of candidates: rising unemployment (if a declining rate of rise), second thoughts about the recovery of the stock market and even the Administration's rhetoric which in recent...

New York City -- The stock market's relatively easy acceptance of the GM bankruptcy -- vastly improved at the last minute by a deal with bondholders to permit a pre-packaged filing so that the bankruptcy is more likely to move quickly-- provides yet another indication that the economy may finally...

One of the things that has struck me more than anything else in directing the NDN Green Project over the last year and a half is how events have so often outstripped policy. Last year when oil prices were spiking, contributing to the economic crisis that erupted in the fall...

New York City - Debt crises, as I have written before, are as old as civilization. And history has shown that when debt exceeds the ability to repay, there is only one solution: debt reduction. This can take the form of a general release as in the Biblical jubilee...

Should the federal government build or incent others to build a new electron superhighway? In other words, a backbone for a 21st century electrical grid? At NDN's recent event on clean infrastructure, U.S. Rep. Jay Inslee asked precisely that question and it's one more and more energy leaders are asking....

The conventional wisdom is that the financial crisis has claimed yet another casualty in the form of meaningful action in the next year on climate change. According to this argument, putting a price on carbon in a down economy is a non-starter. What's more, collapsing oil prices have taken at...