Well, for those of you geoengineering hacks who are keen on biochar, this week provided no lack of entertainment!   Quite an uproar took place in UK based newspaper the Guardian.  George Monbiot took aim at biochar   and its promise to sequester carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.  No holds barred either:

"Sorry, not charcoal. We don't call it that any more. Now we say biochar. The idea is that wood and crop wastes are cooked to release the volatile components (which can be used as fuel), then the residue - the charcoal - is buried in the soil. According to the magical thinkers who promote it, the new miracle stops climate breakdown, replaces gas and petroleum, improves the fertility of the soil, reduces deforestation, cuts labour, creates employment, prevents respiratory disease and ensures that when you drop your toast it always lands butter side up. (I invented the last one, but give them time)."

Toast landing butter side up?  If only!  He went on to pick, poke, and prod biochar for a few more paragraphs, and implicated a few heavyweight proponents...
(read the rest on Celsias.com)

Brought to you by SBN and Ecobob, the Greenlist launched this week.  According to them, this nifty website will feature the "best offers on the most sustainable, healthiest, and safest products and services in New Zealand.  It's the world’s first online directory of green products and services where listings are compared against basic principles of sustainability."

Regarding this post on PSFK "Is 'Planet Earth' The Key To Our Eco Failure?":

I don’t think we call the place that we live as our planet. We don’t use the term ‘Earth’ as the familiar name of the place we live. We live in our ‘world’, we see the ‘world’ around us and we travel across the ‘world’ sometimes to the other side of the globe.

Could the use of the words ‘planet’ and ‘Earth’ by environmentalists of all strips have a negative impact on the public’s perception and relationship to important issues?

...

Maybe ‘Planet’ and ‘Earth’ are too connected in our minds to science and not to our daily lives, maybe the use of those words sounds a little Sci-Fi for the rest of us to really digest and take seriously. It’s interesting to note that there is no mention of ‘planet’ or ‘Earth’ in Obama’s Agenda for the Environment either.

I’m not saying that these words aren’t used by enviornmentalists. It’s just that their use of words that don’t relate to the world around us, might psychologically obstruct our support for international solutions to combat environmental damage around the globe.

I'd like to agree with Piers' comments and draw the line a bit further.  I think that when we use "the environment" in a description of the world around us, we have a similar disconnect as what he describes here.  The environment?  Don't we live here, breathe air, drink water?  Is "the environment" over there ---> somewhere?  Definitely part of the issue in getting people's heads around important environmental and planetary issues is finding the right language to reach them.  Something we all have to work on is connecting people to the reality of the challenges facing the world in a meaningful way, one that inspires understanding and action.

While the credit crunch has taken its toll, 2009 will still be a great year for clean technologies-- this, from the 2009 Clean Energy Report just released this week.  Some key findings according to Clean Edge Research:

• Biofuels (global production and wholesale pricing of ethanol and biodiesel) reached $34.8 billion in 2008 and are projected to grow to $105.4 billion by 2018. In 2008 the global biofuels market consisted of more than 17 billion gallons of ethanol and 2.5 billion gallons of biodiesel production worldwide. For the first time, ethanol leader Brazil got more than 50 percent of its total national automobile transportation fuels from bioethanol, eclipsing petroleum use for the first time in any major market.
  
  
• Wind power (new installation capital costs) is projected to expand from $51.4 billion in 2008 to $139.1 billion in 2018. Last year's global wind power installations reached a record 27,000 MW. In the U.S., which accounted for more than 8,000 MW, wind installations represented more than 40 percent of total new electricity generating capacity brought online in 2008 – and moved the U.S. ahead of Germany as the world's leading generator of wind energy.
  
  
• Solar photovoltaics (including modules, system components, and installation) will grow from a $29.6 billion industry in 2008 to $80.6 billion by 2018. Annual installations reached more than 4 GW worldwide in 2008, four times the total set just four years earlier, when the solar PV market reached the 1 GW milestone for the first time in 2004
  

Together, we project these three benchmark technologies, which equaled $75.8 billion in 2007 and expanded 50 percent to $115.9 billion in 2008, to grow to $325.1 billion within a decade.

Total Investments Reach $155 Billion