The scientific journal Nature featured a loud addition to the climate debate last week by a team of UC-Boulder professors led by Roger Pielke, Jr, a noted climate and policy blogger at Prometheus.

The paper (pdf) argues that the Nobel Prize winning IPCC assumed too much “spontaneous” technological innovation in their studies of how to reduce the carbon intensity in the atmosphere. At the same time the rise of the developing world (read: China and India), and the coal power driving it, has fundamentally altered the baseline for emissions scenarios. Thus, they argue, more public policies are necessary to drive innovation in energy efficiency and decarbonization.

“Dangerous Assumptions,” as it is titled, has been covered extensively by the mainstream media as a warning about ‘underplaying’ climate change. The environmental press, however, has attacked it for blandly pushing technology investment without taking into account the current technologies that could be deployed to fight climate change. Joseph Romm, over at Grist, for example, calls for more deployments of existing technologies over more R&D.

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Among clean tech solutions, we often hear about wind, solar, geothermal, and then “energy efficiency.” This one large category rarely gets the specific treatment–other than a mention of compact fluorescent lightbulbs–that the other segments of the market do. But one company we found, Sustainable Spaces, has taken on residential energy efficiency head on and can offer a quick analysis of your home and sell you services to make it greener.

The company seems to be striking a cord, and they are in the process of scaling up. Since Matt Golden, the CEO of Sustainable Spaces founded the company in 2004, they’ve grown to several dozen employees, and took seed capital from angel investors Blueshift Partners earlier this year. They’re already a profitable company and now they are looking for several million dollars of venture capital to build out their labor-intensive business.

They’ve also found some surprising results. For one, those fancy Energy Star windows? They’re not worth much without a properly insulated house with an efficient heating and cooling system.

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A few weeks ago, many greens jeered when Richard Branson put a little J05 biojetfuel in the tank of one of his airliners. It was not enough, others said, and at worst, it was a distracting stunt.

In the greentech world, we see the ‘problem’ as carbon dioxide emissions leading to climate chaos and the ’solutions’ as wind, solar PV, solar thermal, plug-in electric vehicles, and a variety of energy efficiency technologies. So, a little biofuel in a jet doesn’t really send our hearts racing. It’s fine, but it’s also, well, beside the point.

But not everyone is inside the Silicon Valley bubble. This weekend, the AP wrote up a story about the idea rising in military circles of transforming coal into jet fuel, and diesel for long-distance trucking. The idea is that such a coal-to-liquids setup would reduce the need to import oil from unstable regions, while allowing the US to use the several hundred years worth of coal in American reserves.

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High oil prices have driven investments into biofuels and alternatives to petroleum-based product options. Even though some of the efforts appear misguided from an environmental perspective, the influx of cash has allowed a variety of new ideas to receive funding. But dirty solutions to the price of oil are beginning to ramp up. A troubling new article in the chemical industry trade mag, Chemical and Engineering News, reports that coal is making in-roads as a feedstock for bulk chemical production.

“If the price of oil stays above $50 or $60, I think that within 10 years, using coal as a chemical feedstock will be a very big industry in China,” says Zhang Yuzhuo, a Shenhua Group vice president and chairman of China Shenhua Coal Liquefaction.

Running directly counter to “green chemistry” companies like one funded in November Novomer, some in the chemical industry are exploring gasifying coal into methanol, which is a step away from the building blocks of bulk chemicals, ethylene and propylene. The economics seem to indicate that crude oil over $50 a barrel will make coal an economical option.

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Investments in Indian cleantech companies increased a dramatic 58 percent in 2007, growing to $210 million from $133 million in 2006. The numbers are part of the Cleantech Group’s new report, “Cleantech India Venture Capital and Private Equity Investment,” and were announced today at the Cleantech Forum in San Francisco, where about 900 attendees heard pitches from companies looking for cash.

We’ve been following some news out of the conference this week like the launch of Wal-Mart’s green-innovations web site, and San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom’s aggressive cleantech rhetoric over local carbon legislation. The meeting’s organizers, the Cleantech Group, claim that $1.1 billion worth of deals have stemmed directly from previous iterations of the event.

India got special billing at the conference because Vinod Khosla, perhaps the world’s best-known alternative energy investor, will be chairing the Cleantech Group’s first Indian forum, slated for October 2008.

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We all know that corn-based ethanol isn’t the route of choice to a sustainable future, but what if corn wasn’t really corn at all?

Researchers at Iowa State have pieced together the genome of maize and will announce it Thursday at the oh-so thrilling-sounding Annual Maize Genetics Conference in Washington, DC. Mapping the corn genome is actually remarkably complicated, as it contains about twice the number of genes as our own DNA and the act is being hailed as a milestone. The researchers even got their school’s president, Gregory Geoffroy, to opine, “Understanding the corn genome will accelerate efforts to develop crops that can meet society’s growing needs for food, feed, fiber and fuel.”

But oddly enough, the press release doesn’t mention genetically modifying crops at all. And genome mapping, of course, is a step towards enabling genetic modifications of various kinds to a species of plant or animal.

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Richard Branson’s Virgin Atlantic conducted the first flight of a commercial aircraft with some jet biofuel in the 747’s tank. You can basically call it ‘J05′ as the biofuel represented a mere 5 percent of the total fuel mix — three of the plane’s four tanks were filled with standard jet fuel, while the last one contained 20 percent coconut oil and babassu nuts.

While even this event might have been cause for rejoice just six months ago, in a sign that the environment around biofuels has changed dramatically, environmental groups armed with a new Nature study criticized Branson’s flight.

Kenneth Richter of Friends of the Earth told the Guardian:

“Biofuels are a major distraction in the fight against climate change. There is mounting evidence that the carbon savings from biofuels are negligible.”

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When the journal Science publishes two studies questioning the greenhouse gas reduction benefits of biofuels, it’s bound to garner attention even if the cleantech community has long known that first-generation biofuels are not the answer to global climate change. And, combined with a paper deriding the sustainability of hybrids published in the International Journal of Automotive Technology and Management, it would seem that a sea change is occurring in 2008 in the clean transportation space. As many of the hard facts about the first-generation of greener transportation technologies are coming to light, many researchers are finding that their net impacts are mixed at best.

The hybrid paper was lead authored by Jean-Jacques Chanaron, research director within France’s version of the National Science Foundation, the French National Centre for Scientific Research. Chanaron writes that the growth in hybrids across US car manufacturers, “is based more on customer perception triggered by very clever marketing and communication campaigns than on pure rationale scientific arguments.”

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With advocates of “cleanish coal” bummed out about the government’s decision to pull the plug on the FutureGen coal with carbon capture and sequestration facility, we thought you might need some more positive news about sequestering gases. It comes courtesy of University of Calgary chemistry professor George Shimizu, and his team’s new “nanovalves”.

The researchers have developed a material that can mechanically trap gas at high densities without using high pressure, which often times has safety concerns. According to Shimizu “this is a proof of concept that represents an entirely new way of storing gas.”

Shimizu’s group had been primarily studying the use of the material for fuel cells, with only a secondary focus on gas storage with compression. But fellow University of Calgary professor and a co-author of the paper, David Cramb, believes that their latest nanovalve material could provide a boost (and we would hope, a price cut) for carbon capture.

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A Polish coal plant, which will cofire biomass (burn biomass at the same time as coal) to help reduce its emissions by 25 percent compared with the country’s current coal plants, is due to come online in 2009. A major Polish power group, Poludniowy Koncern Energetyczny, estimates its total cost at €500 million ($735 million).

The power plant, and others like it that combine renewable feedstock with coal, present a new dilemma for green contemplation. The all-investment, all-the-time arm of the green movement believes that we should be throwing money at all viable technologies that could reduce greenhouse gases. So, Vinod Khosla invests up and down the line in ethanol companies because he believes the intermediate steps will help us get to the end goal of second- and third-generation biofuels that are not as bad as corn-based ethanol.

Dropping some biomass into our coal plants, just like ethanol doping our gasoline, will get us a reduction in coal mining and emissions, but raises the question: Will these small steps actually put off the more drastic steps that we’ll need to take to keep our climate on the rails? Or do we need to do something with coal for the next decade, until some type of carbon capture and storage system?

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