Blowing up over your water heater bill?

The UK-based engineering firm Industrial Design Consultancy (IDC) has plans to mass produce inflatable solar panels that will provide hot water at a fraction of the cost of conventional solar heaters.

On West Virginia Public Broadcast early this morning, Hillary Clinton answered questions about her positions on coal. To hear it for yourself, click here.

As we've noted in our profile of her climate policies, her stance on coal flunks the global warming test. Before going into a careful dissection of her remarks, let's remember a few things.

In 2007, the hard work of environmental organizations, business groups, mayors and citizens all over the country managed to halt construction of 50 coal plants from moving forward. James Hansen, the pace-setting climate scientist, has repeatedly exhorted policymakers to abandon coal entirely in order to face down global warming. Otherwise we have little chance, he says.

Republican Governor Charlie Crist of Florida, committed to climate solutions, has stopped new coal plants from being built in his state. In Kansas, Democratic Governor Kathleen Sibelius is fighting to do the same, facing down legislators and very heavy coal industry lobbying in her state. The Wall Street Journal called Kansas "ground zero" in the coal fight in an article just this morning.

So where is the political courage and leadership of this aspiring president on the coal question?

Listen to how she frames it -- all wrong:

Well coal fits in very importantly, um, because obviously we have a great reserve of coal and we get more than 50% of our electricity from coal. The challenge is, how we're going to continue using coal and uh, meet a lot of our environmental challenges.

No, Senator Clinton, the challenge is, how are we going to stop using coal.

It's gets worse.

B.Y.O.M—bring your own meat—is the strategy the U.S. Olympic committee plans to implement this summer in Beijing. Wary of steroid-laden proteins from China, U.S. Olympians are relying on Tyson Foods to send them 25,000 pounds of American meat—beef, chicken and pork—for the summer games.

Meat produced in the U.S. won’t fully alleviate their concerns. Remember the recent massive beef recall? And let’s not ignore the carbon footprint of this Olympic strategy, which is not limited to the gas-guzzling transport of goods across the globe. The other downer—the inconvenient truth the other Nobel Laureate spoke—is that “meat is a very carbon intensive commodity.” Even before you fly it across an ocean.

The stage today was set perfectly for the President to show global leadership on renewable energy. The State Department had convened the largest international renewable energy conference ever to take place in America -- WIREC 2008 -- right there in Washington. Illustrious panelists, hundreds of side events, a booming trade show, thousands of attendees -- all set up to hear what the President would have to say.

What did he do with the non-renewable opportunity? He pulled a Marie Antoinette. His message to the assembled multitudes was this:

Let them eat corn.

July 4th 2007 was Nancy Pelosi's energy independence day, a day when new legislation delivered by the Democratic majority was supposed to start delivering America out of the hands of fossil fuel interests and toward a responsible posture on global warming.

Not much happened in Congress then -- or quite frankly, since -- but something else did happen last July that's worth remembering instead: the first step on the road to generating 10% to 20% of the nation's energy from the sun by 2030, according to solar energy CEO Peter Duprey.

A project called Nevada Solar One got switched on in a place called Boulder City, Nevada. Congress didn't notice even though it was the first plant of its kind to be built in 17 years, and was, in Duprey's words, "the beginning of the resurgence of large-scale concentrated solar power in the US and the world."

If the beef he has with Washington gets resolved, that is. Here's the crux of it.