But talk is cheap: Obama surges ahead in the race to be green | Camilla Cavendish - Times Online

Going low-carbon is no longer a seminar subject for caring greens. It's a real live competition to beat the oil regimes and make profits, in which the new environmentalists will be alpha males.

The President's speech was astonishing. “America will not be held hostage to dwindling resources, hostile regimes and a warming planet,” he said, on his sixth day in office. The US would no longer “bankroll dictators” but would create its own energy from the Sun, wind and soil. Unchecked climate change would lead to “violent conflict, terrible storms and irreversible catastrophe”. It was wrong to deny the science, he said. It was wrong to think that clean energy would damage prosperity. This was not the lukewarm language of appeasement, aimed at the green lobby. It was the language of wartime: a declaration of war on fossil fuels.

In one week America has gone from playing the dirty, recalcitrant schoolboy to auditioning as the world leader on climate change. That's quite a shift. And it has indicated to every energy investor and green entrepreneur that America is now the place to do business.

More odd stuff from James Lovelock - The fight to get aboard Lifeboat UK - Times Online

Indeed, in its way, the green ideology that seems to inspire northern Europe and the United States may be in the end as damaging to the real environment as were the previous humanist ideologies. If the UK government persists in forcing through impractical and expensive renewable energy schemes, we will soon discover that nearly all of what remains of our countryside becomes the site for fields planted with biofuel crops, biogas generators and industrial-sized wind farms – all this when what land we have is wholly needed to grow food.

Don’t feel guilty about opting out of this nonsense: closer examination reveals it as an elaborate scam in the interests of a few nations whose economies are enriched in the short term by the sale of wind turbines, biofuel plants and other green-sounding energy equipment. Don’t for a moment believe the sales talk that these will save the planet.
...
I am not a willing Cassandra and in the past have been publicly sceptical about doom stories, but this time we do have to take seriously the possibility that global heating may all but eliminate people from the Earth.