Flourescent Light Covers

TMCnet GreenTech World Week in Review

Became law, it raised the mandatory efficiency standards on light bulbs – standards that most of today's incandescent bulbs cannot meet in their present form – leading to a phase-out in 2020 of the outmoded incandescent bulb in favor of CFL (compact fluorescent bulbs), LED light bulbs, standard fluorescents, and hybrid bulbs. After a lot of drama about “who does the government think it is telling us what kinds of light bulbs we can and can't buy?” the U.S. House of Representatives – which has been under Republican control since 2010 – managed to throw together a bill that would repeal the new federal light bulb standards, despite the fact that a president from their own party, George W. Bush, passed those standards. On July 12, the bill failed to muster a two-third majority vote. Geez...next thing you know, the government will be able to mandate what kind of fuel efficiency standards our cars must have. Oh, wait....

Former U.S. Vice President and environmental activist Al Gore launched a new campaign and a supporting website on July 12, aimed at exposing the “full truth, scope, scale, and impact of the climate crisis.” The Climate Reality Project is an event – and a grassroots movement – focused on extreme weather and climate change. From September 14 - 15, “24 Hours of Reality” will be broadcast live online – once, at 8 p.m., in each of 24 time zones – in 13 languages. “For the event, Gore will introduce a new presentation modeled after his 2006 Oscar-winning documentary, “ An Inconvenient Truth.” Each hour, a different person will deliver the presentation in a new time zone, enabling  people living with the reality of climate change globally to connect the dots between recent extreme weather events – including floods, droughts and storms – and the manmade pollution that is changing the climate. The new campaign replaces Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection, which claims 5 million members around the world.

In a hearing on July 14, the U.S. Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee marked up and approved the 21st Century Energy Technology and Deployment Act  Deployment Administration (CEDA) –while, at least for the moment, circumventing questions of how to pay for the measure, during this period of budget contention. According to “Inside EPA’s Clean Energy Report,” as a result of the hearing, a joint staff amendment to the CEDA proposal removes direct spending provisions from the bill and scraps an exemption from the Federal Credit Reform Act that had drawn objections from both environmentalists and conservatives. CEDA would be an independent administration within the DOE with strong financial expertise ,and with a specific purpose to create an attractive investment environment for the development and deployment of new clean energy technologies.