Dave Levitan's Climate Chronicles

Just a few years ago, the idea of replacing kerosene-based jet fuel with renewable fuel from plants seemed out of the question. The cost of producing such alternative fuels dwarfed that of traditional jet A-grade fuel, and moving a severely carbon-intensive industry toward cleaner fuels would only happen if the economics worked out.

A 2008 spike in oil prices and a global economic slowdown later, and suddenly bio-jet fuel isn’t just back on the table, it might be in your airplane’s engines in the next four or five years.

Abandoning Nevada’s Yucca Mountain as a potential long-term repository for nuclear waste was an Obama campaign promise, and it garnered public support in the state and from opponents of nuclear power everywhere.

Now that the Department of Energy has officially begun the process to withdraw its application, though, it is clear that not everyone shares the same desire to shutter the decades-old project.

Ideas involving global-scale geoengineering projects aimed at sucking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere have already faced their share of criticism, but new research on one such idea, ocean iron fertilization, suggests yet another question: Do we want to geoengineer flocks of killer birds run amok -- the kind made famous by Alfred Hitchcock?

This is clearly taking things to extremes, but a study published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showed that seeding the ocean with iron results in blooms of tiny organisms called phytoplankton that harbor high levels of a toxin known as domoic acid. Although harmless to the phytoplankton—and in fact, it helps them out-compete other species—domoic acid eventually finds its way into birds and mammals, where it accumulates in the brain and can cause dizziness, disorientation and eventually death.

It has long been speculated that the mass die-off of sea birds that Hitchcock witnessed along the California coast, inspiring his 1963 classic movie, could have been the result of just such a phytoplankton bloom and resultant domoic acid poisoning among the birds.

When the front door won’t open, try the back. Try the side door and all the windows, too.

The Environmental Protection Agency last week settled a lawsuit brought by the Center for Biological Diversity with an agreement aimed at addressing the causes of ocean acidification in coastal states and potentially regulating those causes under the provisions of the Clean Water Act. With the EPA’s intent to regulate large stationary greenhouse gas sources under the Clean Air Act already considered a back door to climate regulation and under fire from some lawmakers, this new avenue represents yet another way into the problem.

The Environmental Protection Agency estimated recently that the United States emitted about 6,946 million tons of carbon dioxide-equivalent greenhouse gases in 2008. Or did it?

According to a study published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, taking a look at what Americans consume as well as what they produce could add more than 10 percent to the total.

Colorado’s legislature approved one of the toughest renewable energy standards in the country on Monday.

Once the governor signs that legislation, utilities will be required to get 30 percent of their power from renewable sources by 2020. That follows an agreement Gov. Bill Ritter signed last week with Colorado’s largest utility, Xcel, and a coalition of energy companies and lawmakers to reduce pollution and shift several coal-fired power plants to natural gas by 2017.

The state’s clear move toward renewable energy — and away from coal — stands in stark contrast to some of its neighbors in the West, where the best and some of the worst of clean energy policies are on display.

If Hawaii's largest utility gets its way, the islands' abundant sunshine may be wasted.

In February, the Hawaiian Electric Company (HECO) proposed a ban on a booming industry of rooftop solar installations, claiming that too much distributed power generation could destabilize the islands’ isolated power grids. It was forced to back off by the public backlash, but environmental groups and the solar industry say the utility is trying other tactics that will stifle the growth of renewable energy in the state.

“Although HECO is backing away from doomsday for the local renewable industry at this point, all they did was defer the problem,” said Isaac Moriwake, an attorney for Earthjustice who is representing the Hawaii Solar Energy Association.

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Biofuels are touted as a cleaner alternative to fossil fuels, but they come with their own set of problems. One of the biggest concerns lies in the displacement of food crops like corn, which can raise food prices and have other indirect effects around the world on land use and agriculture.

A new production method could begin to alleviate that problem while solving another: It turns trash into biofuel.

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson faced questions today from senators about her agency’s fiscal year 2011 budget request. Although representing only a small portion of the $10 billion total request, the ongoing battles regarding the EPA’s aim to regulate emissions of greenhouse gases from some sources took center stage.

The agency seems to be under attack from all angles when it comes to greenhouse gas regulation — House members seeking to overturn its authority to regulate greenhouse gases, senators calling for delays on regulation, states and industry groups attempting to sue. These maneuvers are drawing national attention and dividing Democrats in Congress. However, the chances of permanently preventing the EPA from regulating greenhouse gases appear slim.

There has been a lot of talk of next-generation reactors in the U.S. "nuclear revival," but some plans for new nuclear power generation are looking back rather than ahead.

Alongside a multitude of pending applications for new nuclear reactors, there is a move to restart construction at sites where the work began decades ago only to be abandoned before completion.

On Monday, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission held a hearing on challenges to the reinstatement of construction permits for one such project. It involves permits granted to the Tennessee Valley Authority to build the Bellefonte nuclear reactors, two reactors that were started near Hollywood, Ala., in 1974 but never finished.