While the voluntary carbon trading economy is booming (it tripled in 2007 to $331 million) the power of free-market economics has yet to directly connect our own personal actions with carbon emissions. This week, the UK nixed plans to get people to reduce their emissions via an exchange of personal emissions permits. Citing issues of practicality, the ministry said implementing the system would be excessively expensive and that the idea is “ahead of its time.”

The idea was based on the system used in the EU’s emissions trading scheme whereby industrial emitters can buy permits for the right to pollute and players who reduce their emissions can sell excess permits on the open market. The system has proven itself effective in combating sulfur dioxide emissions in the United States and is growing in popularity as a way to regulate carbon emissions from industrial players around the world.

However, making the jump to a personal exchange is quite ambitious. The biggest barrier is simply measuring one’s personal emissions. This would include home energy costs, travel, food and other goods purchased. British supermarket giant Tesco had plans to list the carbon footprint of the good it sells but has discovered how hard it is to calculate the carbon cost of individual grocery items.

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Just in time for Earth Day, the Department of Transportation said it couldn’t wait until 2020 for the increase in the national fuel efficiency that was approved by Congress to take effect. In January, as part of the Energy Bill, Congress voted to raise the corporate average fuel economy (CAFE) standard to 35 miles per gallon, fleet-wide, by 2020 but left the intermediate timing details up the the Bush administration. The new DOT regulations put forward a fleet-wide goal of 31.6 mpg by 2015.

While the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers politely told Cleantech.com that car makers are ready for the change, even with the accelerated schedule, this is exactly the sort of divided and piecemeal fuel efficiency regulation that automakers dread. We’d like to think that it would force automakers to speed up, or at the very least stay on schedule, with their forthcoming plug-in electrics and hybrid offerings, but the auto industry historically has no problem asserting their independence from regulations.

A cynical op-ed from the Wall Street Journal called the DOT’s move a “fitting Earth Day hoax” and an attempt for the current administration to do some last-minute greening, as the Secretary of Transportation is a presidential appointment.

The WSJ piece went on to explore how this will impact Chevy’s much ballyhooed all-electric Volt, a sure money loser but a great green photo opp. As GM tries to out-Prius Toyota, this new deadline could be good news for the flagging American automaker. The Volt is ambitiously scheduled for delivery in 2010. If GM can push enough Volt’s off the lot, even at a loss, it will boost their fleet’s average fuel efficiency, allowing them to sell more of their gas-guzzling, high-profit trucks and SUVs.

With President Bush suddenly concerned about America’s carbon emissions, it seems appropriate that Bush’s favorite fuel of yesteryear, hydrogen, should be getting some recent attention, too. The California Air Resource Board (CARB) is making $7.7 million available for the improvement and expansion of the state’s hydrogen-fueling stations.

Currently, there are only 24 hydrogen fueling stations in California, mostly around Los Angeles and San Francisco. And according to CARB there are only 209 hydrogen-powered cars. The $7.7 million would represent about a $37,000 investment in each one of those hydrogen cars, enough to buy each owner a brand new fuel-efficient car of their choice.

While Bush and Gov. Schwarzenegger gave hydrogen power a disproportionate amount of lip service about five years ago, we had hoped that the emergence of plug-in vehicles and biofuels had made hydrogen old news. Besides the fact that hydrogen requires an entirely new infrastructure (hence the $7.7 million), it shouldn’t be thought of as an energy source.

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Yeah, I know, loan guarantees aren’t the most scintillating topic around, but stay with me. They’re a big deal when it comes to financing big clean energy projects and not really that difficult to understand. Essentially a loan guarantee is a promise by the government to back a loan if the company can’t pay it, and the loan goes into default.

Earlier this week the Department of Energy said it would provide a total of $38.5 billion in loan guarantees spread out across several industries, with $10 billion allocated to renewable energy and electric vehicles, $20.5 billion for nuclear projects and $8 billion for “advanced fossil energy projects.”

This is great for cleantech startups because the federal government has a lot of money and banks consider it to be a reliable borrower. Cleantech startups generally operate at a loss and are considered high-risk borrowers by banks. For any high-risk borrowers (like Uncle Lennie, who has no job and $40,000 in credit-card debt) banks will demand a lot of money up front and a high interest rate before lending money to them. With plants for solar cells or facilities for solar thermal electricity generation ranging in costs from millions to billions, it’s pretty challenging to raise that kind of capital.

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Addressing the nation from the verdant White House Rose Garden, President Bush delivered an agenda-shifting speech today on carbon emission controls. The take-home message was that Bush has set a goal of stopping emissions growth by 2025. While the president failed to offer any specifics as to how we get there, “technology” and “clean energy” were prominent themes.

Democrats and the blogosphere were quick to react. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi blasted the president for blocking serious climate change initiatives for the previous seven years. Andrew Revkin at the NYTimes’ Dot Earth blog called it a “super-slow-motion” reversal, while the WSJ’s Environmental Capital blog summed up the remarks as “a shift in U.S. climate policy — sort of.”

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Today the U.S. Senate voted to pass an amended version of the BILL, H.R. 3221 to include an extension of both the Production Tax Incentive (PTC) and the Investment Tax Credit (ITC). The PTC provides extra money for wind power while the ITC helps fund solar installations. So hooray! Now, before you get too drunk off of the legislative lager, this doesn’t mean the ITC and PTC have all green lights. The bill will now have to head back to the House where Democrats will likely, and rightfully, question where the money for these extensions is going to come from.

The amended bill passed with overwhelming 88 to 8. While the House has passed extensions for these renewable energy tax credits several times over the past year, the Senate has failed repeatedly to extend them past their December 2008 expiration dates, often times failing to pass by just one or two votes.

While the Democrats have been adhering to their tough “pay-go” policy of not passing legislation that doesn’t stipulate where its funding comes from, Josh Dorner at Grist points out that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the House Dems easily passed a $17 billion package for clean energy just last month.

While the Democrats would love to fund these extensions by cutting some of the billions that Big Oil collects from Uncle Sam in the form of tax breaks, this has been the sticking point for Senate Republicans.

The Senate amendment was drafted by Sens. Mary Cantwell (D-Wash.) and John Ensign (R-Nev.), who had previously introduced their bipartisan Clean Energy Tax Stimulus Act of 2008 just last week.

So, while this is certainly not the final chapter in the ITC/PTC renewal saga, it does show that there is good will on both sides of the aisle for this issue. Now the two sides just need to figure out how to fund it.

Making San Francisco a solar city isn’t enough for Mayor Gavin Newsom — he also wants to refashion it as the new windy city. Speaking beneath a 1.8 kW Skystream wind turbine in San Francisco’s Mission District (spied by E2T here), Newsom announced the creation of the “Residential Wind Power Work Group,” which will investigate the feasibility of small-scale wind power generation in the city.

One of the things we wanted to underscore is the opportunity to take wind turbines and bring them into an urban setting. Most people are familiar wind turbines when they go down the Altamont Pass or they go down towards Palm Springs or Bakersfield…Many are not familiar with the opportunity to do wind in their own backyard, in this case quite literally.

Newsom said he became interested in wind power while pushing for tidal power under the Golden Gate Bridge, saying the tidal turbines are simply submarine wind turbines. He added that the Public Utility Commission (PUC), which has been studying tidal as well as wave energy off the coasts of San Francisco, is now also actively investigating offshore wind turbines — the ultimate in NIMBY eco-phobia.

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Your twilight years probably won’t be spent cloning your pet dog or reforming the California energy market. But then you aren’t a bored billionaire looking to leave behind a legacy in clean energy (and your pup, Missy).

We’re talking about John Sperling, the founder of diploma mill University of Phoenix who’s also been portrayed as “the Howard Hughes of Biotech”. The 87-year-old Arizonian billionaire’s current plan is to back the Solar and Clean Energy Act of 2008 with his considerable wealth. The Californian ballot initiative would greatly boost the state’s renewable energy mandates and streamline the process for siting and approving renewable energy projects.

Many in the cleantech world, however, are less than thrilled with the proposal. “The initiative was put together by people who didn’t know what they were doing,” Ralph Cavanagh of the Natural Resources Defense Council told the LA Times. The problem, critics say, is that the act’s idealism would set unachievable mandates and accelerate permitting, resulting in a careless, ineffective and loophole-ridden energy system.

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There’s nothing like breathless morning show radio reports declaring “what the kids are up to these days.” NPR says young people are “flocking” to the carbon markets, both to make money and to feel like they’re doing some good in the world. After listening in on a dinner with three 30-somethings, all of whom work at energy think tanks and firms that sell renewable energy credits, the report declares them to be the whiz kids that are “pioneering the new carbon economy.”

Yeah, we’re excited, too. Except the carbon market is still rife with issues that have yet to be addressed — regulation, oil prices and transparency, to name a few. Regardless, our favorite quote from the NPR report comes courtesy of New Energy Finance’s Nathaniel Bullard, who says he gets asked questions like: “Hey, I’ve got a big pool of methane-oozing manure at my hog farm in Iowa, what can I do with that?” We’ll leave you with that picture.

Two Senators have reached across the aisle in an attempt to resurrect an extension for the soon-to-be-deceased renewable energy investment and production tax credits (ITC and PTC, respectively). Sens. Mary Cantwell (D-Wash.) and John Ensign (R-Nev.) introduced The Clean Energy Tax Stimulus Act of 2008, which proposes to extend the ITC by eight years and the PTC by one year.

The move has been applauded by solar and wind energy lobbyists and could be good news for solar startups and wind giants. Though, the bill conspicuously doesn’t say how these extensions will be paid for. Previous iterations of the bill called for cuts in gas and oil subsidies to fund the tax credits, but that move sank the bill in the Senate and garnered a threatened veto from the White House.

The bill also makes several amendments to the current tax credits. It seeks to abolish the $500 cap (per 0.5 kilowatt of capacity) for fuel-cell power plants as well as the $2,000 credit cap for solar electric properties. The bill also redefines the PTC to include “marine and hydrokinetic energy” meaning that tidal and wave energy projects could also now qualify.

Some are calling the new bill “promising,” but the lack of pay-fors could easily be a sticking point as the bill moves through the legislature.